Ya burnt, John O'Hara

Of the many delights of LIFE ITSELF, just one for now: Roger Ebert recalls a college professor who deemed John O'Hara a "first-rate second-rate author" -- fine with young Roger whose tastes leaned more toward Thomas Wolfe instead. Ebert would later review his professor's book badly, and then be capsized with guilt over it, but appreciate his words sometime later when he almost flunked out of study-abroad eligibility.

It's a great book, is what I'm saying, and I'm glad one of my coworkers (hey, P.!) is reading it simultaneously so we can talk about it later.To be a little unfair to a writer I otherwise like, this is the kind of nostalgia book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID wishes it was.

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.

Euphemisms, with John O'Hara

This one was new, from A RAGE TO LIVE: "I'd sure like to dip my socks in her coffee."

Uh... yeesh. Sounds more like a bad prank if you ask me.

Reading on the Road: Sea of Tranquility edition

I'm off to a wedding in which the bride is, and I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, the biggest Jane Austen fan I know. Back when we were unfinished young ladies yearning to put our hair up, sitting in the drawing room dreaming about Mr. Darcys past and future, contrasted with the quality of the gentlemen who at that time would not dance with us at balls and whose calling cards were so often grievously misspelled... but I digress.

She didn't go for the Regency Wedding option in the end, but I'm fine with that. Wouldn't be as fun doing the above-pictured in England anyway.

I'm taking my Kindle and a few paperbacks, including A BEND IN THE RIVER and A RAGE TO LIVE, because I have some epically long flights ahead. It's an unfortunate redundancy packing-wise but shouldn't be too much of a luggage strain. I look forward to returning no longer "Printer Paper White" but at least "Acid-Free Paperback Buff." ("Seventies Paperback Yellowed" is to be avoided for a number of reasons. "Amazon Carton Brown," impossible.) Enjoy the automagical (TM Shauna Reid) blog updates in my absence.


Photo: emma_maria

Reading on the Road: Just Like In "Bridesmaids" Only Completely Different

Bachelorette parties: Special!

Books you started weeks or months ago and have been pushing around subject to deadline-oriented material ever since: Not special, but bound to entertain on the bus ride. (While I love the train and like to fly, Bolt Bus has not treated me wrong yet.)

I'm taking Vera Brittain's so far excellent memoir TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, which I bought and started back in October (?!?!?), and John O'Hara's novel A RAGE TO LIVE, which I think I started about a month ago. Maybe another book? Should I? ...Ah, the pre-trip waver, how well I know ye.

This isn't actually my edition of A RAGE TO LIVE -- mine's an ancient paperback I snagged off Bookmooch a long time ago, but I like the look of it.

So, what kinds of parties are you going to this weekend?

22. John O'Hara, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA

"Till the day you die I hope you never, never know what it feels like to have someone cut you open all the way down the front of you and let the freezing blast of air inside."

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that mankind life in the state of nature tends to be "nasty, brutish and short." John O'Hara would definitely agree with this description. This book was short (my Penguin Classics edition, the same one I could have hit a squirrel with, had HUGE text) and had its share of nastiness and brutishness -- a book it clearly influenced, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, looks optimistic by comparison -- but satisfying.

One night, Julian English, an upper-middle-class used-car dealer, married, no kids, gets drunk and throws a drink in someone's face at the country club. In the claustrophobic Pennsylvania town where he lives, doing this ruins his life; although he seems surprised at every turn at the consequences, we're not. Anyone's face would have been bad enough, but his target, Harry Reilly, is quite well-liked in town, a self-made man as opposed to Julian's inherited wealth; he's also part of the town's vocal Catholic minority, and the allegations by other people in town of prejudice seem to be... not completely unfounded. (We later find out there's another really good reason he shouldn't have thrown a drink at him.)

I thought this book was incredibly well-constructed; there wasn't a lot of action in terms of people going off and doing things, but the shifts in perspective between Julian, his wife Caroline and Al Grecco, a local mob operative, kept up the pace. Historically speaking, it's also a useful reminder that the Great Depression, during which this book is set, didn't affect the entire country equally -- extremely obvious point I know, but it bears repeating. The Englishes' hometown of Gibbsville is more affected by Prohibition, which (unsurprisingly, given how much Julian drinks) plays a crucial role in the story. And, as in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and "Mad Men," there's the shadow of a war -- in this case, World War I -- and the issue of Julian's non-service is thrown at him in a way that makes you suspect it is always brought up when someone really wants to wound him, like Philip Carey's foot.

At the same time, I had trouble getting a handle on Julian. His unreliability is established so early on that what he said didn't seem to matter -- when it wasn't "I love scotch. Scotch, scotchy scotch" -- but the rumors about his behavior that he is forced to confront after the incident suggest no one around him is particularly inclined to tell the truth, either. I felt closest to deciphering who he was in a flashback about him running away at fourteen, and via Caroline, who describes him as "turning on the charm like the water in the tub."

No one in Julian and Caroline's circle owns a farm any more; their idea of nature is sneaking out onto the golf course at the country club with their lovers. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA could be taken as a negative to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town": if we leave farming entirely, our sons will become alcoholics and our daughters will be promiscuous. That's way more simplistic than O'Hara is setting out to be -- the chapter on a young Caroline falling in love and trying to decipher the related social mores is one of the best and subtlest in the novel -- but Julian and Caroline are no George and Emily, which root cause is explored in the book. But when I looked it up, I found out "Our Town" was actually written after APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA was published, which makes it look either reassuring or more blindly nostalgic. I love "Our Town," but it made me question that fondness, not that I minded. In fact, I definitely want to check out some of O'Hara's other work.

LN VS. ML: 51 read, 49 unread.

Next up: I've started #49 WOMEN IN LOVE on Dailylit already; otherwise, either #50 Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CANCER (despite strong warnings against it) or #92 William Kennedy's IRONWEED.