Word: haras
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...From the Terrace, O'Hara...
FROM THE TERRACE, by John O'Hara. The biggest (897 pages), most ambitious novel of a writer who takes himself more seriously than it is possible to take his most recent books. A potentially nice rich kid from O'Hara's Pennsylvania runs short on character, presumably because of the sins of the father and the social disarrangements of his own time. The O'Hara ear for speech has the relentless giveaway of a tape recorder-but it reels on too long. Head and shoulders above the year's run of the mill, but still...
...affair with an ambisextrous psychoanalyst. Alfred in turn is smitten with a nacreous 22-year-old named Natalie, and thus begins a 16-year-old triangle that develops many more than three angles. The secrets of the bedroom have always been the worst-kept secrets in O'Hara's novels, and the pages of Terrace are crammed with knowing sinnuendo. But O'Hara seems to make a more serious effort in this novel than he did in either A Rage to Live or Ten North Frederick to subordinate sex to plot rather than plot...
Space, Time & Snobbery. From the Terrace has all the O'Hara virtues and all the defects of those virtues. His ear for dialogue has never been truer, but when page after page of unselective trivia has been set down, the reader finds himself aching for an earplug. O'Hara continues to describe the nuances of social habit with rare authority in a society in which social flux continuously alters the symbols of prestige. But the snobbism of the right prep school, the right club, the right street in the right exurb becomes so intrusive that Terrace often reads...
Author O'Hara, who wrote this novel in a two-year, eight-hour-a-day stint, prides himself on always delivering his manuscript to his publisher on the promised date, but it is increasingly clear that this external discipline has been paid for with the loss of inner form and tension. Diffuse, repetitious, overly detailed, Terrace suffers badly from the fallacy that to fill space is to conquer time. When Appointment in Samarra appeared almost a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald had a challenger. From the Terrace is probably the best novel...