Word: hara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
There is a distinctly American flavor to O'Hara's fictional world. His best writing deals with his roots--the section of northeastern Pennsylvania called "The Region," where anthracite coal is mined. But in all fairness, O'Hara's evocation of life in Latenengo County cannot match up to Faulkner's treatment of Yoknapatawpha County or Hemingway's States-based fiction about the Florida Keys...
...Hara does manage to capture twentieth century culture in this country. He has an artist's eye for detail: clothing, automobiles, popular music, slang--all are carefully described in his books. And it is for a purpose. When an O'Hara character drives a Buick or adopts dated slang, it tells something about his personality and social standing...
...Hara's preoccupation with the upper class and its foibles (George Frazier of the Boston Globe commented after O'Hara's death that "he knows about court tennis and custom tailoring and chic clubs...") narrowed his literary scope. Some characters do stand out: Julian English is well drawn, and the recurring figure of Jimmy Malloy, an autobiographical character, is quite believable. But O'Hara the novelist was content to write about a social order that, in the words of the critic Conrad Knickerbocker, "began to flake away...
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...