O'Hara's Unplanned 'Obsolence'

...And some of the ways O'Hara knows of getting these things told are interesting—even his less attractive habits, such as forcing too much exposition into long, meandering dialogues at the beginning of the story, or resolving the ending with a gimmicky sudden death or a sudden shift of tone...

...For all the effort, however, the feel of the stories is never contemporary...

...To pretend that these things have been caught by invoking a contemporary name or phrase will not do if it goes no deeper than that...

...In a way, it is odd that O'Hara, of all writers, tells us so little about ourselves, or about our society...

...their vulgarity, their flamboyance is out of What Makes Sammy Run...

...Thus, the difference between a John Held flapper and a Scott Fitzgerald girl takes up a lot more space than, say, any discussion of the effect of planned "obsolence," or (why not...

...Resurrected by a friend from the past, the letter is an almost perfect evocation of the half-daring, half-frightened temper of a young man of that time...

...For O'Hara's stories are hardly ever rich, or tense, or funny, or even ironic fa any important sense...

...But for the most part, they are merely technical variations on O'Hara's familiar themes...

...O'Hara's timidity in dealing with 1960 would hardly be worth remarking upon if it were not that he is so rigorous himself about details...

...This is a curious way to introduce one's work...

...Why force us to look at the small things when bigger things count for so much more...

...If it is important whether a character says "half dollar" or "50cent piece," certainly it is even more important to know the going ideas, the new styles in personality and the changing values...

...Why pretend that it is vital to a successful short story to know whether women who have gone beyond the eighth grade will or will not say "half dollar" when speaking of a 50-cent piece...

...There may be as many as a dozen persansr in the world who are able to detect the techniques employed...

...The author's foreword calls specific attention to his technical proficiency...

...In a story called "The Pioneer Hep Cat," O'Hara makes one of his scrupulous distinctions by correctly noting that "hip" and not "hep" is the more contemporary usage, but he kids his own pedantry by having an old fuddy-duddy tell his tale...

...They do not take care of themselves...

...That things have changed from "hep" to "hip" O'Hara is aware, but the real effect of their change is not apparent to him...

...No more...

...He can (and always could) tell what kind of life a retired boxer lives when he gets into the bowling alley business, or what a woman does with a letter from an old boy friend, or about the kinds of self-delusion that show people have...

...Mostly, they are press-bench versions of latterday Valentinos or Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swansons...

...But there are the right contemporary allusions to Jack Paar, to Bobby Darin and Tommy Sands, to T-Birds and Bikinis, to ascorbic acid tablets and to planned obsolescence ("planned obsolence," the character calls it...

...Why make so much of the secrets...

...But already I'm obsolete...

...One has the sense, finally, that O'Hara knows it goes no deeper...

...What is good dialog...

...But the bigger things are not so easy to come by...

...There are references to Pearl Harbor and to "Guadai," but it might have been Belleau Wood for all the effect it has on the climate of opinion, on the fashions of belief, on the emotional temper of the stories...

...Yet the convenience of Knowing How is plenty: All but three or four of the stories were written in a single summer, "most of them in about two sittings of three hours apiece...

...author, "The Treatment Man" John O'Hara's new collection of short stories adds little of value to the body of his work...

...Nor can anyone tell whether the irony lies in the fact that things are so different now or in the fact that they are so much the same...

...The date of the letter is 1916...

...I cannot imagine a reader being curious about what would happen if the story went on...

...What is a character's first speech...

...These stories follow his practice...

...he asks...

...Two or three of the 26 stories in the volume have a touch of life, a certain depth of feeling, or a nice angle of vision...

...Certainly it is not because he is concerned with the atypical...

...They are not as elaborately documented, of course, as a novel like his From The Terrace...

...of the difference between Bobby Darin and Tommy Sands...

...The stories provide the obvious answer...

...Many of the characters are close to 60 (O'Hara himself is 55), and it is natural for old people to reminisce about the past...

...The answers, he confides at once, are incommunicable, part of the arcana of the trade...

...The characters are pinned to the page, completed within the episode told...

...Signs are not symbols...

...How do you start a paragraph...

...The one substantial treatment of an attitude toward warfare is embodied in a long letter written by a character in a story called "The Compliment...

...That its meaning directly contradicts the brisk and bully tone of his foreword is the most bruising irony in the book...

...O'Hara does the small things well...

...The actual subject of the story turns out to be a singer of the '20s, whose biography, the fuddy-duddy purports to believe, may have some moral lesson for the young people of today...

...As the old pro looking backward over a career, O'Hara challenges the "tyro author" to notice not his message (or messages), but rather his devices...

...He has made a reputation as a student of that society—partly because he goes to some trouble to make his social data circumstantial, and to include enough minutiae to make clear that he is making his points about a particular place at a particular time...

...Rather the contrary: He concerns himself with people who are motivated in ways that are shared by many in the society of which he writes...

...only that of an earlier day seems dealt with feelingly...

...But no letters appear from Pearl Harbor, "Guadai" or Korea...

...O'Hara is much more comfortable with the data of the '20s and the '30s, and this material is allowed to dominate the collection...

...How things have changed...

...At best, we learn something about them, but almost nothing about ourselves since we are not involved...

...Take World War II...

...Throughout the collection, the actors and actresses of today, the painters and writers, the stalwarts of the communications industry— all of whom ought to be most vulnerable to their era—tell us little or nothing about 1960...

...Well, not quite forty...

...It does not...

...In the last pages of the last piece in his collection (it is one of the two novellas in the book), he has his main character, a doctor, say: "I've only been practicing a little over thirty years...

...The doctor's commentary is such a curious anti-climactic irrelevancy in the story that it must have some personal significance for O'Hara...

...The data of 1960 becomes pseudo-reference...

...Sometimes, too, there are bogus contrasts drawn between the past and the present...

...Temperamentally, they are of the Hollywood or the Greenwich Village of some time in the past...

...It is amazing how many different plots can be revealed with so confined an approach and so attenuated a method...