Word: bruccoli
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...While Bruccoli deliberately overstates his case, he certainly touches upon aspects of O'Hara's fiction that have previously been ignored. In comparison to some of his contemporaries, though, O'Hara does not fare as well as Bruccoli would have us think...
...John O'Hara's confidence in his own abilities as a writer was never supported by reviewers or academics, before or after his death. Now, six years after his death, Matthew J. Bruccoli, professor of English at the University of South Carolina, offers a reassessment of the controversial author's work. In a critical biography called The O'Hara Concern (Random House, 417 pp., $15.00), Bruccoli argues that O'Hara must rank as one of America's best novelists and our greatest writer of short stories. In a final chapter, Bruccoli details his reasons. He lists what he considers...
Perhaps the worst flaw in O'Hara's writing, despite Bruccoli's disclaimers, is its lack of a compelling intellectual or moral framework. O'Hara conveys emotion and action as well as anyone, but it is hard to discern any overriding vision beneath his surface realism. As a result, O'Hara's world seems almost too simple, his characters living and dying in a near moral vacuum. O'Hara's fiction describes how his characters live but we are left wondering why they...
...even a partisan like Bruccoli will admit that O'Hara's novels never quite measure up to his short stories. He had matured as a short story writer. By the 1960's, the early wandering sketches he had published in the New Yorker had gradually evolved into well-plotted and elegant short stories. If, as Norman Mailer (another Nobel-chaser) once wrote, the real short story writer is a jeweler, then O'Hara's best short fiction has the brilliance of carefully polished jewelry. O'Hara's later short story style depends on a clean, taut prose that unobtrusively serves...
John O'Hara is rarely included in reading lists of American literature courses, nor do graduate students burn to write dissertations on him. But Bruccoli's biography is the first step in the right direction. O'Hara deserves more attention. He was not the best of those who wrote about his time, but no one could deny that he was a professional, or that he wrote honestly and well...