Word: oed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...Johnson. Alfred's brother is the apple of Papa Samuel Eaton's eye, and poor Alfred is the apple core. When the brother dies at 14, Alfred is cut off without a pennyworth of love by the steelmaster millionaire father. With old-fashioned pre-Freudian directness. Author O'Hara allows this rebuff to clue the pattern of Alfred Eaton's life. From then on, he is destined to confer his love rather than give it, to make contact with people rather than make friends. His outwardly charming, cold-fish personality seems to carry a jinx. Before...
College (Princeton) releases Alfred from family pathos and small-town parochialism. O'Hara, a noncollege man who lives in Princeton, lavishes a special nostalgia on the college scene where an Ivy Leaguer becomes a species of feudal knight surrounded by noncollege varlets...
...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...