Just another day at the farm

I picked up A RAGE TO LIVE after reading and enjoying John O'Hara's Modern Library entry APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA, which I had taken from its title to be something in the post-colonial arena but turned out to be a dark drama among the boozy country-club set in rural Pennsylvania. But I stuck with A RAGE TO LIVE, through its occasionally action-free swaths, because of the promise of its first chapter, maybe the best lead-off I've read all year.

The first chapter locates the action in similar country as APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA, albeit in a more rural setting. A prominent small-town (contradiction implied) couple, the Tates, is hosting the governor for a charitable function on their impressive farm. Mrs. Tate is the local offspring and inheritor to the farm, the former (but some would say still) town beauty who married up and imported her college-educated husband out there to become a "gentleman farmer." It's a bucolic scene, whose tiny dramas here and there (a sick girl, a dispute among local law enforcement about patrols) only reinforce its general peace, and at the end of the night, duties discharged, Mr. Sidney Tate turns to Mrs. Grace Caldwell Tate in bed and says:

"This place won't be the same without me, will it? But when I'm gone will you still be wondering how much I know, how much I've guessed, Grace? Good night." 

Aaaand... off to the races. Until this bombshell, the reader believes (in absence of any evidence to the contrary) that the Tates' marriage is a happy one; afterward, no one will believe that it had been happy even for an instant. The rest of A RAGE TO LIVE travels back and forth from the time of the implosion of the Tates' marriage. Through one lens it's a lurid morality tale; another, a wide-angle study of a town over decades and how modern life creeps in. But I pressed forward, ever forward with this book, to figure it out.

It's hard to say whether O'Hara, working here, is acting as a pulp novelist accessing higher themes or a highbrow literary lion digging into the muck of bad behavior. His presence on the Modern Library list at all suggests the latter, but there's something about his specificity and almost-glee in reproducing, say, the conversation of two wealthy men about the prostitutes they're hiring, suggesting that what he really wants is to write the kind of trashy novel one might wrap a better book's book jacket around. On the other hand, his reproduction of these conversations is so pitch-perfect as to affirm his seriousness... or does it?

What's clear is that this book was substantially longer than APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA and kept its lurid promise all the way through. What Grace is accused of, while not that shocking, is characterized as an attack on everyone in the decent Christian town of Fort Penn, moreso that she refuses to admit to any wrongdoing. (The hilariously sensationalized copy on my vintage paperback, a tie-in for the 1965 movie starring Ben Gazzara, makes her out to be somewhat different -- the modern version would be something like "MILF On The Loose!!!") It's a terrific book to read continuously but might lose some of its draw when broken up. Finally, a source of delight to me, O'Hara was wildly prolific and there will be a good deal of his books in my reading future.