Katy Carl’s stories revive and renew the spiritual vision of Flannery O’ Connor
Fragile Objects: Short Stories by Katy Carl. Wiseblood Books, 2023. 318 pp., $15.00
I study children’s literature filled with “quiet old ladies whispering hush.”
When we think of grandmothers, specifically Southern grandmothers, we think of baked goods and good moral upbringings. When I think of my small-town South Carolina grandmother, I think of delicious food, but I also think of childhood terror. This is not to say my grandmother ever did anything one might see in the tabloids, but she was a particular sort of Southern grandmother. Flannery O’Connor might have known her at some point. Katy Carl definitely did.
Reading the title story in Carl’s collection Fragile Objects, I got chills. A theme throughout Carl’s collection is materialism versus spiritualism—a strict accounting of love that is expected in some family and religious cultures.
When Bub, the boy protagonist in “Fragile Objects,” visits his grandmother with his dad, the grandmother constantly calculates the love the two have for her. No matter what they do or say, their love will never add up. They will never do enough for her. She assumes they want the trinkets she has in her house, those “fragile objects.” She asks who will take care of each object she owns when she dies, and if anyone will take care of the objects well. Although these two men are at her house, caring for her, she only asks about the things. She scoffs at her son and grandson, assuming they will fail in taking care of the baubles that occupy her during their visit, “frangible curiosities Bub knew he must never touch.”
As with most of the stories in this collection, the end of the story raises questions rather than giving answers. The grandmother throws a fragile object, a mug, at her son’s head, and he finally leaves out the front door. “[Your] backwoods comes out when you’re angry,” he tells her, suggesting that this incident is not the first such offense. When I say that this story reminds me of my childhood, I actually recall my grandmother throwing a mug at my mom—the crashing noise and slamming of a door that happened right after, all in front of my grandmother’s small yellow house. I remember the humid upstate South Carolina heat, and sticking to black vinyl seats in a car with no air conditioning, as I waited for the fight to end so we could go home. Katy Carl captures Southern families in an almost eerie, haunting way.
What happens next in Carl’s story is the saddest part. I won’t spoil the ending because I want you to read this story and the whole collection, but I will share the emotional resonance, which matters for this review. The dad in “Fragile Objects” gives his son the car keys so they can begin to leave, just as my mom and I did: His son is young and nervous, unready for such a burden. (My mom and I simply drove away.)
The grandmother and the dad are so locked in on their animosity and twisted love toward each other that they forget about Bub. They forget about the vulnerable child in the situation. Carl had written a few paragraphs earlier that Bub had once been a curious child but had given up this part of himself because of his family dynamics: “He had not stopped having questions: He had just stopped asking them.”
When we prioritize objects, selfishness, and pain over the hopes and dreams of those we love we quelch forward-thinking curiosity and stay stuck in the past. The grandmother and son only see each other when the story is ending; never do they see Bub. They only fight over objects, never love. That is the emotional punch with which “Fragile Objects” ends. Humans too are fragile. And their bonds are the most fragile object of all.
Other stories similarly consider whether flawed humans can have discernment about love when it most matters. “The Convert” follows a college student, Tyler, whose scrupulosity leads him down a destructive path, as he harshly judges his friends and family. Tyler’s faith has bestowed him with a newfound “jumbled annoyance with his housemates,” a “desire for friends who also understood faith (he figured they must exist somewhere), and suspicion that his current friends prevented him from making the good decisions he meant to start making, but never managed to make.”
Tyler’s obsession with Fight Club reminds of Christians of all backgrounds who treat religion more like a battle to wage than a call to love. While Tyler claims to want discernment, he seems to want power and control over those he considers below him—a commonality he shares with the grandmother in “Fragile Objects.” Tyler loses friends and family in this story—yet doesn’t seem to realize the gravity of the loss. And because he is so focused on what religion can give him in terms of personal development, we don’t know if he’ll ever regain what he’s lost.
But the story that most spoke to me as a mother of two young children was “Hail Thee, Festival.” Like the other stories, this one too is about discernment: How do we know if we are showing love appropriately, not only to each other but to God? Moreover, how do we show love in a world steeped in capitalism, a world that wants us to put a price tag on all that we encounter, including each other? How do we engage in formation in a world where our children are asked daily to buy apps and upgrades and YouTube toys to unwrap, with toys inside those toys to unwrap, leaving us to throw away the trash of this wastefulness?
In “Hail Thee, Festival,” Bonnie, a young mother, volunteers at a parish fundraiser. The story begins as a seasoned veteran worker shows Bonnie the ropes, telling her the array of activities the celebration has to offer families and children: cornhole, balloons, clowns, henna tattoos, etc.
Bonnie has brought her daughter who, like the other children, walks around the festival with sweets, toys, and knick knacks galore. In a way, we have returned once more to the titular story in the collection: We encounter more fragile objects that we know will be broken soon beneath flip flops on concrete, or squished in the back of car seats, or smashed behind old sippy cups.
An older woman, known in the parish for praying the rosary with abandon, moves toward a child’s wading pool at the festival that has been turned into a duck pond, where children can “fish” for prizes. Yelling that the festival is devoted to the worship of Mammon, the woman overturns the pond. In Matthew 6.24 during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his Disciples, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” This festival scene echoes the moment when Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple in a burst of righteous indignation (John 2.15). Just as Jesus confronted the corruption that had infiltrated the sacred space of worship, the older woman in “Hail Thee, Festival” challenges the intrusion of consumerism into the spiritual realm.
Her actions provoke discomfort and resistance. Bonnie is particularly affected by the scene. Moreover, readers like myself who often go to festivals such as this are asked to confront our complicity in a culture that often equates worth—and fun—with accrual of possessions. As usual with Carl’s writing, this story does not leave the reader with a clear answer. And yet Bonnie poses a question near the end of the story that I have often contemplated since I first read it. Maybe, Bonnie reflects, it is “[better] to watch these children carry, so lightly as they do, the groaning burden of this inescapable excess. The only question left is: How can we appease these children, so that one day they may be able to forgive us for all we’ve given them?”
Are we doing the right thing by our children at these festivals? I do not have the answers, but I do have many worries.
Carl’s stories revolve around what we are given in life—good and bad, much and little—and how we react to those gifts. While there are many stories along this line (“Jack” and “Allie” probably the most well-known because they won Best of the Web Fiction award in 2021), the book ends with what I see as its best story—“Awards Day.” Whereas the rest of the stories in this collection thwart redemption, this quiet story about a child’s award day ceremony and her family’s reaction to her special moment—and her reaction to her family—does not.
Carl is right: Humans often choose to focus on the fragile objects rather than the lasting ones—the material over the spiritual. Ah!—but on awards day in this concluding story the high school student chooses something more lasting. It is not a perfect moment we are given, but its imperfection makes it all the more grace-filled, beautiful, and true. This story filled my soul, even as it made it ache. That is how I knew I was reading prose that was transcendent.
Flannery O’Connor once said, “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” O’Connor undoubtedly influences Carl’s writing, yet I found Carl’s style gentler, less freakish and more odd. Less jarring overall and truer to a strange moment or two. As a Southern convert to Catholicism, I always tell people that I wish I loved Flannery O’Connor’s writing.
I like O’Connor. I respect her. Yet I can say without equivocation that I love Katy Carl’s writing.
Some readers may be aghast, and, yes, this might reveal more about me than it does Carl. However, I think it says more about the latter. Carl is restoring and reviving O’Connor’s type of writing to modern Catholic sensibilities. Like O’Connor’s characters, Carl’s have chances for redemption and grace. And sometimes they even get that grace in the here and now. This, too, is the beauty of life that good fiction captures.
Art reflects back to us the tragedy, the suffering, but also the joy, that make up our material and spiritual lives. It is the joy of a well-deserved high-school award (something material), while you are standing there, thinking about all the reasons stacked against your getting it—and finally enjoying that award because you see now what it means to you and to your family (something immaterial). That feeling, veering from sadness to righteous anger as it occurs in the story—and even to fear and trembling as we might term it as Christians—transports readers closer to God.
Yes, good Catholic fiction knows that sometimes we get the awards, the joy, the grace in the here and now. And, yes, it also knows that in twenty years our grandmothers might be flinging those awards out the doors of their screen porches at us. But that suffering is worth capturing, too.
Fragile Objects is worth buying and reading. And then rereading with a good glass of sweet, iced tea.
LuElla D’Amico is an Associate Professor of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinator at the University of the Incarnate Word. She is co-editor of Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Her current book project examines exploring the Catholic faith through the wonder of children’s literature.Â