Word: haras
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...NORTH FREDERICK (408 PP) -John O'Hara -Random House...
John O'Hara is a skilled writer who hates small towns and (intellectually speaking) has small chance of ever leaving one. The one he has chosen to hate and not permit his readers to leave is a place called Gibbsville, Pa. (he was born in Pottsville, Pa.). The same people are present in this Zenith-on-the-Schuylkill as lived when Julian English made his famous Appointment in Samarra. Old Dr. English is older and discouraged, but Novelist O'Hara, though older (50), is not discouraged...
Within Novelist O'Hara's chosen limits, there are to be found the expected narrative skill, and knowledge of a sort. The Gibbsville town assesser could not know more. O'Hara has a tape-recorder ear, a headwaiter's instinct for credit rating, and a preoccupation with different means of making love which, if supported by one of the great foundations, could put Dr. Kinsey right back among the gall wasps...
What is missing from Gibbsville? Human and intellectual qualities, the lack of which also disfigured the work of another U.S. writer who chose success and snobbery for his theme. O'Hara, like Scott Fitzgerald, is a writer of great natural talent but, like Fitzgerald, disappoints in the end for the poverty of his general ideas and tawdriness of his notions of a good life. It is odd that both of these very American writers should go into such an un-American swivet as to who sits below whose salt. Yet Fitzgerald, in his delighted fellow-travels with the rich...
...Mary's the Great, official church of Cambridge University, arranged for Billy to use his pulpit. Though regretting CICCU's "exclusive attitude" of noncooperation with other religious bodies, he explained: "We must continue to help them when we can, providing we are not expected to commit intellectual hara-kiri...