In Flannery at the Grammys, Irwin H. Streight identifies the striking occurrence that a number of popular musicians, from singer-songwriters to punk and metal bands, acknowledge the influence of the work of Flannery O'Connor, the devoutly Catholic writer whose fiction was Christ-centred and focused on the shattering power of grace in a world given to anything but. Streight proposes that many of the artists he studies – including Bruce Springsteen, Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams and P. J. Harvey, among several others – were attracted to O'Connor's work because the artists were themselves Christ-haunted, piercingly aware of Christ's searing presence, even if, at least publicly, they weren't living deeply religious lives. Given this religious angst, the artists’ fascination focused primarily on several of O'Connor's stories about Christ-obsessed characters (particularly ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find‘ (1953) and ‘The Lame Shall Enter First‘ (1962)) and her two novels, and most significantly Wise Blood (1952), in which Hazel Motes, the novel's startling dissolute protagonist, does everything he can to put Christ behind him, until in the end the blinding force of grace catches up with him. In contrast, other songwriters drawn to O'Connor, such as Mary Gauthier, Sufjan Stevens and Kate Campbell, seem less Christ-haunted than Christ-infused, their songs imbued with a profound spirituality, even if that spirituality often feels distant from O'Connor's startlingly violent manifestations of the holy.

Streight has amassed a mountain of evidence pointing to O'Connor's significance in the lives and works of the musicians whom he discusses. It is in fact astonishing to see how often the artists identify O'Connor as a shaping influence, including in comments, as the rather ungainly title of Streight's book indicates, at the Grammys. Yet it is also astonishing to see how hard Streight pushes to find evidence of O'Connor's influence on specific songs and albums, as if these songwriters were doing little else than reconstituting O'Connor's perspectives and stories in their songs (there are a handful of instances in which songwriters were doing something like this, but it's very rare) – and as if there weren't myriad other musical, cultural and literary influences at work. His observation that ‘Kate Campbell is a sort of inverse double to O'Connor as a songwriter’ (p. 12) points to how far Streight is willing to twist things to find O'Connor's sway – if the influence isn't straightforward, just flip the perspective. And the title of his chapter on Springsteen, identifying him as ‘The Flannery O'Connor of American Rock’ (a quote from Australian songwriter Toby Burke), shows how far Streight is willing to extend his argument, making Springsteen not merely O'Connor's follower but her guitar-toting reincarnation.

Streight's chapter on Springsteen is particularly instructive in identifying the strengths and the limits of his analysis, making a strong case for O'Connor's general influence while arguing myopically for her sole status as Springsteen's guiding light. Following a few other critics, Streight posits, reasonably enough, that Springsteen's upbringing as a Catholic has stamped his overall perspective and eventually drew him to O'Connor's work. Streight finds O'Connor's influence emerging in Nebraska and continuing in later works in which Springsteen turns to quieter, stripped-down songs exploring what Streight identifies as the darkness of the human heart. That Springsteen's musical shift can be directly attributed to his reading of O'Connor, as Streight posits, is deeply problematic. ‘As in O'Connor's often dimly redemptive narratives’, Streight writes, ‘even in Springsteen's dark songs the careful listener can as well discern a hopeful “pin point of light”’ (p. 11). Streight here misreads the narrative arc of O'Connor's fiction (it's never ‘dimly redemptive‘ but always explosively redemptive) so as to conform Springsteen's lyric treatment of the dark underpinnings of American society to this misreading. In fact, unlike Springsteen, O'Connor had virtually no interest in American society and any of its underpinnings, focusing her fiction instead entirely on matters of the spirit. Social concerns in her work all but disappear before the stark choice her characters ultimately face: commit to Christ or the Devil. While in interviews and statements Springsteen has repeatedly acknowledged his affinity with O'Connor, finding that affinity in specific works is much more difficult than Streight makes it. And one can't help but ponder all the other influences shaping Springsteen's later work, including Woody Guthrie and other singer-songwriters who give voice to the down-and-out, along with, turning to a literary figure, John Steinbeck, whom Springsteen directly acknowledges in his title The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Similar problems circulate in, and indeed shape, all the chapters Streight devotes to single artists. Perhaps his strongest chapter, in terms of general influence, is that on Lucinda Williams, who as a child met O'Connor and whose father, the poet Miller Williams, early on encouraged her to read O'Connor's works. Streight does a good job establishing the overall O'Connor–Williams connection, but in working through Williams's songs he eventually (and predictably) pigeonholes her as O'Connor's acolyte, all but ignoring her other influences (most importantly her father's poetry). As in the Springsteen chapter, he skews O'Connor's fiction to make it compatible with Williams's songwriting, including a bizarre argument that the two share an affinity for glorifying the cliché.

Streight's final two chapters, one surveying references to O'Connor's Wise Blood (including album covers and band names) by punk, metal and alternative rock performers, the other listing brief references and comments (in songs, liner notes and interviews) to O'Connor's work by a wide assortment of musicians, are not his most weighty but are his most convincing in documenting O'Connor's strange, if not uncanny, presence in the rock music universe. Unlike in the other chapters, Streight here primarily lets his impressively collected evidence speak for itself, curbing his enthusiasm for shaping – and misshaping – O'Connor's fiction to make it the inspirational fount for some of the most important artists of recent popular music.