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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning disappointment for O'Hara fans, September 15, 2003
This review is from: The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara (Hardcover)
I am a passionate proponent of O'Hara and was bitterly disappointed in the new bio, which, aside from telling us absolutely nothing factually new about this great underappreciated writer, waxes self-indulgent, neglects O'Hara's major achievement in the novella, skimps on the last 20 years of its subject's life, provides none of the historical context for O'Hara's fiction, and betrays a lack of comprehensiveness and comprehension. Wolff adds nothing new to previous biographies, though his prose style is superior. He evidently spoke with very few people, or gathered little from those he did speak to. He completely relies on previous biographies for his facts. The cardinal flaw is that Wolff discusses relatively few of O'Hara's writings, and only these in terms of how they reflect the writer's personality. A personality Wolff seems to loathe. Wolff concedes that he originally intended to write a totally different book about O'Hara, then got sidetracked. Much like Edmund Morris in his Reagan biography, Wolff imposes his own neuroses on the subject, occasionally making his own concerns as a writer central. Who cares? Of the many reviewers so far, only John Updike offers any insight and some redress. His is the only review that has confronted Wolff's ill-advised approach. Interestingly, writing in the New Yorker, Updike also takes Wolff to task for misrepresenting the magazine and its editors. Lord knows how many other inaccuracies there are in the book. It is outrageous that such commentators as Jonathan Yardley, Charles McGrath and even Larry McMurtry have taken this book at face value and used it as an occasion to derogate O'Hara. Typically, Wolff repeats ad nauseam O'Hara's many drunken exploits, but does not examine at all the impact of O'Hara's going permanently on the wagon the last 17 years of his life. Surely, if his besotted condition contributed to his loutishness, then his sobriety must have had some effect as well. Most lamentable is that Wolff doesn't venture an intelligent reassessment of O'Hara. He just retails the usual complaints, thinks O'Hara peaked with Appointment and Samarra and the early stories. He offers no explanation as to how this evidently inept novelist became so popular, nor does he provide even a token traversal of the some 400 short stories and the magnificent novellas. In fact, he seems only to have read McShane's selected story collection. It is telling that Wolff devotes more pages to O'Hara's two much-maligned essay collections than to The Lockwood Concern, Ourselves to Know, Elizabeth Appleton or any of the phenomenal late short story collections. There was no purpose for this book. It adds no information not provided elsewhere, provides no insight into O'Hara's preoccupatino with suicide and lesbianism, indeed, provides no reason why anyone should be interested in O'Hara. The big loser here is probably Random House. This book will make them little money and the opportunity for a well-deserved O'Hara revival has been shot.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dreadful, slovenly, inaccurate, December 1, 2003
This review is from: The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara (Hardcover)
I delayed writing this review because I don't like trashing anyone's work. But this book is so infuriatingly bad that I finally felt compelled to blow off steam. O'Hara deserves better. The reader certainly deserves far better. And Knopf, a one-great publisher in sad decline, should have either done extensive editing on this horribly self-indulgent mess or simply not published it. As an O'Hara fan (who recognizes his flaws as a writer and, certainly, as a man) and a born-in-"Gibbsville" insider, I assure readers that the author did not do the most basic research on O'Hara's home town. On the contrary, Wolff appears to have fabricated a number of quotes he claims to have collected in Pottsville/Gibbsville. But the voices don't sound like the voices I know, in tone or content, and the quotes suspiciously support the author's utterly inaccurate thesis that O'Hara's never been accepted "back home." Well, in downtown Pottsville, there's a handsome statue of O'Hara. Every year, there's a "John O'Hara Weekend," with performances, readings and seminars. O'Hara still appears so often in local newspapers and magazines that you'd think he was still living and writing. I grew up reading his work--and never heard any of the silly, parochial--and, of course, anonymous--criticism Wolff claims to have encountered immediately upon arrival during his apparently brief visit to Pottsville, the inspiration for so much of O'Hara's greatest fiction. And Wolff even gets basic facts wrong, from ethnic composition to the location of hotel bars. Later in the book, as well, he continues to indulge his habit of quoting anonymous sources who perfectly support his eccentric, self-adoring themes. And the prose itself is a mix of trash bio that makes Kitty Kelly read like Boswell and gonzo-tone scream-of-my-precious-consciousness slop that should have been submitted to the author's psychiatrist, not to a publisher. Poor O'Hara--his own worst enemy during his life, now afflicted with biographers who are his worst enemies after death. O'Hara was a great, if flawed, author, currently underestimated. Indeed, he merits a serious critical biography that does more than simply repeat the traditional wisdom that his late, sprawling novels had little merit; on the contrary, despite their flaws, novels such as A Rage To Live and From The Terrace offer incomparable social portraits of America during the first half of the 20th century--and his first novel, Appointment In Samarra, is flawless, a middle-class (though not middle-brow) Gatsby. I recommend reading his own work, rather than this appallingly bad pretense at biography. Finally, I apologize to all, even to the author, for writing such a negative review...I would rather praise a book. But this biography is so disgracefully bad that I felt obliged to warn other readers off. Any of the earlier O'Hara bios would be a much better choice for those interested in O'Hara's troubled, troubling but remarkably productive life.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thumping good read, poorly proofread!, August 27, 2003
This review is from: The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara (Hardcover)
It is safe to say no one who's not interested in John O'Hara or Geoffrey Wolff will pay good money for this book in its first few days after publication. O'Hara is a half-forgotten writer these days, popularly imagined to be a manufacturer of middlebrow potboilers, though from the 30s to the 60s he was in the front rank of American novelists and was arguably the finest contemporary writer of short stories. But I expect this book to hang around the backlist for many years to come. A subterranean O'Hara revival has been bubbling for a while, and this may be the book that forces it into the light of day. Hurrying that process along is one of Geoffrey Wolff's main objectives, he explains at the start of the book. My only gripe is that in hurrying it along, Mr. Wolff neglected to get the thing proofread. An astounding number of factual errors and typos appear in the book, suggesting that the 'manuscript' went straight from Wolff's typing apparatus to the printshop. The errors range from minor ('Lackenau Hospital' for Lankenau Hospital, 'Kay Keyser' for Kay Kyser) to extraordinary (Wolff calls the Hemingway character Robert Cohn "Robert Cohen"; not only is Robert Cohn a major character in Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises but the book _opens_ with that very _name_!). A subtler, more egregious error is Wolff's repeated reference to a Scott Fitzgerald novel as "The Beautiful and the Damned." This was a boo-boo made by some perfunctory newspaper obits when Fitzgerald died, and biographers have been snorting over it ever since. Sometimes he gets the title right, which suggests that Wolff didn't even do much rereading of his own final ms. Usually I think it petty to list proofreading errors in the course of a casual review. I offer the above with the suggestion to the eminent Mr. Wolff that he get a couple pairs of fresh eyes to proof the damned thing before it gets into its second printing--which will come soon enough, I am sure. Mistakes aside, this is a thumping good page-turner. Wolff wisely does not linger over every hangover, book review, and barroom punchout, but hurries the O'Hara career along with everything else, leaving just enough room for a few pages of tasty critical comments on the major O'Hara novels and stories. He does not spend too much time on the never-ending thumbsucker of why O'Hara's reputation faded and (for the present) vanished, though he suggests (as did Fran Leibowitz in an interview) that the main problem is O'Hara's personality. There are just too many people still alive who hated his guts. A simpler explanation for O'Hara's eclipse is simply that fashions change. Nobody was reading Herman Melville in 1890. Sinclair Lewis was pretty much out of fashion after after 1930, though he kept cranking out novels in his patented formula for another 20-odd years. In John O'Hara's case, he was just reaching maturity in the 1940s and 50s when American letters underwent a bouleversement from which it has yet to recover. Essentially, old-stock Americans in the lit biz were being snuffed out and replaced by special-interest groups who promote their own agenda mercilessly. Enough said.
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