Word: hara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FROM THE TERRACE (897 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
John O'Hara is perhaps the U.S.'s chief social embalmer of manners and morals among the moneyed. His latest novel is a massive pyramid of prose raised over the mummified form of a minor Pharoah of finance named Alfred Eaton. As if by ancient Egyptian custom, Eaton's living tomb is stocked with the appurtenances of his caste and class: tennis rackets, the entrance requirements for Princeton in 1915, a Marmon runabout, a roster of exclusive clubs, a Navy lieutenant's stripes, partnership in a Wall Street banking house, two wives, two mistresses...
Whatever its disabilities, From the Terrace arrives on a literary scene so bleak and hackneyed that the book outruns most of the competition even while standing still. The novel it most strongly resembles is last season's front-running By Love Possessed, though O'Hara's workmanlike sentences bear no resemblance to Cozzens' involuted maze. Like Cozzens, O'Hara tries to strike a balance sheet on a man's life at the mid-century mark. With Cozzens, O'Hara seems to agree that the assets and liabilities all but cancel out, leaving...
...brother is the apple of Papa Samuel Eaton's eye, and poor Alfred is the apple core. When the brother dies at 14, Alfred is cut off without a pennyworth of love by the steelmaster millionaire father. With old-fashioned pre-Freudian directness. Author O'Hara allows this rebuff to clue the pattern of Alfred Eaton's life. From then on, he is destined to confer his love rather than give it, to make contact with people rather than make friends. His outwardly charming, cold-fish personality seems to carry a jinx. Before...
College (Princeton) releases Alfred from family pathos and small-town parochialism. O'Hara, a noncollege man who lives in Princeton, lavishes a special nostalgia on the college scene where an Ivy Leaguer becomes a species of feudal knight surrounded by noncollege varlets...