Encountering O'Hara

A consideration of John O'Hara a much-neglected writer today--whose early work and short work still stands strong.  (I can live without From the Terrace and some of the later, overblown stuff--but Appointment at Samarra is thin, harsh, and on cue.)

Comments

  1. ShelleyAugust 3, 2010 at 4:12 PM

    Say what you like
    About O'Hara,
    But he knew how to title
    A book (Samarra).

    ReplyDelete
  2. StevenAugust 4, 2010 at 8:04 AM

    Dear Shelley,

    Many thanks for the pithy and verse-a-tile observation.

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Human and Humane Sometimes in the face of such evil the only human response is apology, is listening to the stories you do not want to hear or believe and accepting them as part of the world you do not know and then making amends--truly setting things to rights, truly liberating the captive who has been so long languishing through a sin-- not commission, not truly omission, but complete inattention, indifference. It is indifference that robs us of any trace of humanity-- the willingness to allow things to be, so long as they don't affect me or mine. Indifference tamps down the cobbles with which hate paves the pathway to hell for all of us. Indifference is an invitation to inhumanity.
Read more

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more