Word: haras
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...FARMERS HOTEL (153 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
Novelist John O'Hara is an expert at pinning down two kinds of people: those who get hurt easily and those who have a genius for hurting them. His victims and victimizers usually meet in scenes charged with emotional or physical violence, frequently both, and almost always the heel has a field day at the expense of someone better but weaker (Butterfield 8, Appointment in Samarra, scores of tough, tense short stories). Usually O'Hara makes it plain that heels annoy him almost as strongly as he is drawn to them. In his last novel, the bestselling...
...Hara's new novel, The Farmers Hotel, is news for two reasons: 1) at 46, he has arrived at an almost Saroyanesque love of kindness, hatred of cruelty and stupidity; 2) this is his poorest novel...
...stopped at the small-town Pennsylvania hotel one snowy evening, it was only to make a phone call. They were both fortyish and married, though not to each other. But they were in love, the real thing at last. Howard Pomfret speaks to Martha just the way O'Hara has learned to write from Ernest Hemingway: "It was so long ago, Girl. I don't want to remember her, I want to be with you. You're my last love, my final love." A few drinks, car trouble, and the blizzard outside decide the lovers to have...
...think the Cambridge police are very skilled in literary criticism." Howard Mumford Jones, professor of English, commented on the O'Hara...