Word: hara
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Since the deaths of Faulkner and Hemingway, John O'Hara is unquestionably the most famous of living American novelists. Yet he is notoriously discontented with this grudgingly conceded eminence; he is given to complaints that he never won the highbrow vote or the Nobel Prize. And critics who find his work unsatisfactory put him into a considerable swivet...
However, there is evidence that O'Hara shares the critics' dissatisfaction with his creatures-a circumstance that may explain his touchiness. At all events, in his latest novel O'Hara may again be seen at work like a frustrated Pygmalion, infuriated because the being he has articulated with such skill and wired for authentic speech is somehow, after all, not quite human...
Wrong Defeat. There is, of course, a great deal more. Lockwood banishes his son for the unforgivable fault of getting kicked out of Princeton, his daughter gets entangled in an intricate sexual morass in London, he himself acquires one mistress too many (O'Hara tycoons always have several mistresses). His brother kills himself-and the mis tress. In the end there is no one left of the Lockwood concern but the principal person of this private religion. But the chief trouble with the Lockwood concern is that it has also be come the O'Hara obsession. And that...
...there isn't. Lockwood has everything that riches can buy, but he still has the feeling that he is being denied something. It bothers him. It still bothers O'Hara-who has also made it. And that is just the trouble-both with Lockwood as a convincing character and O'Hara as a novelist. For it no longer bothers anybody else. The upwardly mobile do make it. The rich are no longer exclusive. O'Hara is fighting a battle against the Establishment that the Establishment itself has long since quit fighting...
...social history (which O'Hara insists he is writing), it seems no longer relevant. Reading O'Hara is beginning to take on something of the feeling of reading a Victorian novelist...