Word: hara
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...main thing was that he took no nonsense from women. In Gone With the Wind, when he snarled at Scarlett O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," he taught the talkies how to swear. And when he slapped Norma Shearer's face in A Free Soul (1931), he slapped into obsolescence the smooth and courtly Valentino school of hand-kissing elegance. "Perhaps," said Norma Shearer last week, "that was where Noel Coward got the idea for his line: 'Every woman should be hit regularly-like a gong...
SERMONS AND SODA-WATER (3 vols., totaling 328 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
This collection of three related novellas is John O'Hara's best work in years. The stories remind one strongly of the author's early novels, and not only because the suicide of Julian English, the hero of Appointment in Samarra, is an offstage incident in one of them. The prose has the great clarity of all of O'Hara's writing, and an economy of expression that he has seemed afraid to trust in such vast recent novels as From the Terrace and Ten North Frederick...
Attractive Reticence. In his preface, O'Hara mentions the weight factor in bookselling and hopes that readers will not apply the heft test to his small volumes. He need have no fears; done up in a slipcase, the novellas are not only handsome but hefty, and the publisher is able to ask as much for about 60,000 words of text as he does for 260,000. Regrettably, O'Hara also reports that he is working on his heftiest novel yet (previous record: 897 pages in From the Terrace), apparently ignoring the fact that his jumbo works...
They are narrated by Jim Malloy (who appeared in earlier novels), an O'Hara-like man who has been a reporter and pressagent and who, in middle age, is a successful novelist. In the first volume, The Girl on the Baggage Truck, he is a major character, a young publicity man who avoids, mostly by luck, becoming the pet poodle of an aging actress. Malloy is an observer in the next book, Imagine Kissing Pete, concerning an adulterous marriage that worked better than expected. There is a hint in this one of sentimentality, a quality to which the 20th...