Customer Reviews

Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian's Story

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This is a shocking book- and I'm no prude. The NYT Book Review said of it, "O'Hara has the most authentically dirty mind in American fiction." Throughout the heroine, Lovey Child's, Main Line lifetime, people seemed to suffer from the consequences of intense and out of wedlock sexuality. From her mother's affair with a school chum to her own afternoon tryst with a tipsy priest; the punishment seemed greater than the crime.
Though O'Hara doesn't moralize within the narrative, the story itself, the natural consequences of excess and homosexual affairs, (that would be O'Hara's sense of natural,) condemned with a forceful warning. Though the book was published in 1969,
the story takes place in the twenties, and the reader, responds, as the average reader in that era, would be expected to respond. That reaction, for me, included more than a few jolts.
This is a short and for all extents and purposes, not very important work; but it deserves some consideration for its realism and its historical relationship to our own era. We seem to be bombarded with sex from every angle, as though we would be immune to the sorts of goings-on in the life of Lovey and her Philadelphian cronies; and yet, it remains a question as to the authenticity of our liberation, and if such liberation as we imagine as freeing us, is either possible, or desirable. And, again, I'm no prude.