Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whatever its disabilities, From the Terrace arrives on a literary scene so bleak and hackneyed that the book outruns most of the competition even while standing still. The novel it most strongly resembles is last season's front-running By Love Possessed, though O'Hara's workmanlike sentences bear no resemblance to Cozzens' involuted maze. Like Cozzens, O'Hara tries to strike a balance sheet on a man's life at the mid-century mark. With Cozzens, O'Hara seems to agree that the assets and liabilities all but cancel out, leaving...
...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...
...Toward novel's end, when Alfred Eaton's life should be reaching its climax, it comes apart. The surface events are relatively predictable-divorce, remarriage, dismissal by his Wall Street firm, a heart attack. But it becomes clear that for the most part these events are not accidents, that they are not even results of Alfred Eaton's education, past, or environment, but that they are fated by a small, icy crack in his being. The reader is forced to look backward over the story and to revise-what seemed love is suddenly revealed as the very...
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...
...novelist of the first rank, but her second book puts her well in the fore of the usual crowded field panting for the Ladies' Plate. The shrewd characters who make book on form -the book-clubmakers-have given her the accolade (Book-of-the-Month). After the novel's male characters have rescued Milly from the consequences of her own idiocy, the heroine, seemingly immune from disaster, asks her husband: "Darling, where do you suppose we'll go next?" Fans of Milly-or of Author McMinnies -can hardly wait to find...