Word: haras
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...short stories collected in The Cape Cod Lighter demonstrate O'Hara's perception of the hypocracies and paradoxes of our civilization. In the land of the free, the individual is trapped. Each story broadens our understanding of our lives by reminding us of the myriad restrictive pressures which confine us: sex, society, manners, ambition, obligation, capitalism, habit...
...Hara's work is far more profound than its trappings would suggest. Although he has occasionally been dismissed simply as the ranking historian of American manners, the Amy Vanderbilt of the Gibbsonville set, John O'Hara is one of America's important writers. For he is one of her most incisive and bitter social critics...
...made vivid. "I took for granted that you'd be going to the funeral. I just took it for granted," Mrs. Ambrie explains. Her husband accepts this, saying "I suppose the same way people took for granted that Jack Hill (the deceased) was a friend of mine." But O'Hara leaves it to the couple's daughter, who had had an affair with the deceased, to utter the most depressing line of all: "Maybe now I can marry Joe and settle down in (suburban) Greenport and be what I always wanted...
Excerpted, O'Hara dialogue seems melodramatic, but in his stories it reads smoothly. Over the years O'Hara's ear for dialogue has become something of a legend, as critics never tire of reminding us. Yet he did not come by this talent easily: he worked at it as a young journalist. Fox example, in 1929 he got a New Yorker assignment to report the meetings of the Orange County Afternoon Delphian Society. As Walcott Gibbs reflected in 1938, after a while the stories became almost impossible to read, "the sensation was uncomfortably like being trapped among the ladies while...
...good ear is only one of several talents which critics generally concede to O'Hara. Another is a good eye. Lionel Trilling has pointed out that "he knows, and persuades us to believe, that life's deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn...