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Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara (Modern Library Classics)

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Included in this collection is the best single 5 pages, perhaps, in century 20 American fiction, a short-short story called "Graven Image." It is worth the price of the book, and anyone coming to O'Hara is advised to begin his encounter here.

O'Hara was much maligned and misunderstood in his lifetime, and remains so. Irish but Protestant, chain-smoking, rancourous but wise, it is now becoming clear what a giant he was. Everybody mocked O'Hara, mistaking his oft-tawdry subject matter for himself, a process at times he seemed to mischieviously collaborate in. Everywhere, that is, except on paper. They are all long dead now so it no longer matters, only the paper survives. He was perhaps equal to any century 20 American short fiction writer, a very high compliment when Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Capote, Updike, Carolyn Gordon et al are in the running.

Well, fellow Americans, stand up for this determined upsetter of convention. Read him and weep. While a lot of his coevals ran off to Paris, Africa or wherever, O'Hara stayed at home and minutely recorded a massive and awful transformation of his beloved nation -- chiefly chronicling the breakdown in the institution of marriage and the spread of Gilded Age pretense into ordinary folks everywhere, with spreading affluence and free time galore. It is painful stuff for each and every one of us too, delivered without comment or overt moralizing. Son of a small town doctor, he wielded a cold pen the way his pa used a scalpel. No wonder everybody hated him -- but the result is a body of work meticulously recording the massive social changes in the USA with the precision of glacier-cut striations on granite.

"There it is now gentleman, you can take your hats off now," John Peale Bishop said upon the death of Scott Fitzgerald. The comment is more appropriate to O'Hara, who as time passes will certainly cement his place firmly on the short list of major century 20 American writers.

John O'Hara is one of the leading twentieth century American writers of manners and morals. In SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF JOHN O'HARA the author gives a good sampling of his skills in this art. One example is "Walter T. Carriman" in which O'Hara describes the life of a man who lived most of his life in Philadelphia. There are thirty-one other short stories in this collection such as "Too Young" and "Graven Image." A short biography is also included in addition to an introduction by Louis Begley.

It is important to appreciate O'Hara's upbringing as an Irish-Catholic outsider in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. The similarities with John P. Marquand's experiences as a poor cousin living with wealthier relatives in Massachusetts are striking. Marquand is best remembered for his books about upper class New Englanders while O'Hara's strength is writing about middle and upper class people in Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, New York City and Long Island.

These are absolute gems, and whenever I see someone reading John Cheever or Raymond Carver I tell them to put those overrated hacks away and to check out John O'Hara.

John O'Hara was a prodigious writer of short stories. In THE NEW YORKER and other magazines he had more than four hundred stories published. In addition eleven volumes of his short stories were issued during his lifetime.

O'Hara never attended college because of the untimely death of his father but he remained forever interested in the minutia associated with university life. One story which reflected his obsession with the latter subject was "Graven Image."

Some of my other personal favorites in this volume are "Too Young" and "The Next-To-Last Dance of the Season." Another story entitled "The Doctor's Son" is very autobiographical and is influenced by O'Hara's experiences during the influenza epidemic at the end of World War I.

I picked up an old Modern Library edition of the Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara, and was alternating my reading of them with a short story collection by postmodern poseur David Foster Wallace. The difference in skill and accomplishment is immense. As could be expected, Wallace's work is utter tripe- devoid of wordly skill, insight, and any hints of good conversation or character development. Not so with O'Hara; but while his worst is a mile better than Wallace's best he is not a great writer, at least of short stories. That said, I do not believe his current low standing in Academic circles will last, and his work will rise up, although never to the heights it once was in the 1940s and 1950s when his short stories were regular fixtures in the New Yorker. In fact, along with the later Alice Adams, John O'Hara may be, for better or worse, called the grandfather of the New Yorker style of short fiction, which are tales of only one or two layers of depth that are, in the reality of short story collections, usually filler pieces between the meatier and more substantive tales the writer presumes to offer.

One of the things that took a bit of getting used to, especially vis-à-vis Wallace's monumentally bad and overblown tales is just how short the typical O'Hara tale is- about 1500-2000 words in length. That said, I'm not going to tell you that all the tales succeed- perhaps a quarter I would label good or better, and even those are, given the brevity, mere sketches in which a situation is presented, a key incident or element occurs, and then there's a good ending that sticks. In the lesser tales there's usually not enough room to really work up empathy for a character or situation, and the people described end up as full blown caricatures, or relative emotional stick figures. In short, O'Hara was a very formulaic writer, at least in the thirty-two tales in the book, out of the over four hundred short stories in eleven books he published in his lifetime, not including such novels as Appointment In Samarra and Butterfield 8. That he was once considered worthy of Nobel mention shows that dubious resumes have always been considered, even well before the PC Era....although he was a flawed writer who deserved to be knocked a peg or two lower than he was during his life, he shines well above the current morass of what passes for `serious' fiction, and serves as an abject lesson for purveyors of pap today- and I mean you Mary Gaitskill, David Foster Wallace, and Jhumpa Lahiri!