Word: hara
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Elizabeth Appleton, by John O'Hara. You can get the girl out of the Social Register, but you cannot get the Social Register out of the girl, O'Hara seems to be saying in this sharp-eyed study of a Southampton girl who married down into academic life...
...loyalty? Or is she compulsively turning back to the past by pushing her husband toward the presidency of the college, which he doesn't really want? A little of both, probably. O'Hara doesn't say. But when she drifts into an affair, it is with a man of her own class...
There are moments when O'Hara seems to be saying you can get the girl out of the Social Register, but you cannot get the Social Register out of the girl. And there are times, in capsule form at least, when Elizabeth's odyssey sounds like a radio serial that has lost its snap and crackle. But in the telling, it frequently pops with O'Hara's unequaled expertise as a domestic historian. Tuning in on a bridge game or a couple chatting over the supper dishes, watching a college president pushing responsibility for a nasty...
Also Topic A. In earlier O'Hara, Elizabeth's affair might have destroyed her marriage. Now older and increasingly concerned with the final assessments of a lifetime, O'Hara sends Elizabeth back to her husband. Forced to accept the fact that her husband and her marriage are not what she dreamed of making them, she finds that they are both a lot stronger than she thought...
Chronicling Elizabeth's difficult progress, O'Hara unhappily relies on what is bad about his past writing as well as on what is good. Sex is too often not only Topic A, but also Topics B and C as well. His preoccupation with small-town sociology and the lives of secondary characters sometimes leads him to freight his dialogue with extra information until it sounds like a young playwright's first act. The experiment may be merely an attempt to put old wine into a slightly new bottle. It is not vintage O'Hara...