Word: hara
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Frye upset Army's Paul Bucha last year, but Bucha, the Cadet's captain, has supposedly improved and the race will doubtless be close. The backstroke will also be close, where sophomore Tony Fingleton and junior A1 Lincoln, winner against Springfield, meet strong competition in Cadets Gatsey and O'Hara...
Bombast aside, however, O'Hara's decision to stop writing short stories for a while seems wise. The Horse Knows the Way (the title has overtones of weariness and self-mockery) is his fourth large collection of short stories in four years. O'Hara's imagination is astonishingly agile, and his view of society and psychology is much broader than it is generally supposed to be. These stories, taken by themselves, have the sting of fresh work by a fine writer. But he has written so many stories that his fresh, vigorous writing is debased...
...still very much ahead. One of the best stories in the new collection lacks any trace of sameness. It is about the suicide of a bass-fiddle player, and with beautiful simplicity it conveys a sense of sadness and longing more intense than any work of O'Hara's since Appointment in Samarra...
Gnats & Cigar Smoke. O'Hara is right in thinking that his standing as a novelist has been misjudged. But critics have some excuse for slighting him: his last three novels have been poor. Ourselves to Know, a period piece, did not work very well; Elizabeth Apple ton was insignificant; and The Big Laugh collapsed in a foosh of elderly cigar smoke...
...fiction as a thoroughly successful study of a man reaching for the highest financial power. The novel is 897 pages long; it lacks drama and is built, like most lives, entirely of minutiae. It moves slowly and reaches no climax; yet at the end, when O'Hara has shown why his able, moneyed hero has lost the game of command, the reader feels strongly and unexpectedly moved...