Books: Heeltalk

FILES ON PARADE—John O'Hara—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Though he has neither Lardner's indescribable humor nor Hemingway's Paris-found sense of style, John O'Hara ranks with them as a first-class, far from phoney reporter. Appointment in Samarra, his first and best novel, was good enough and true enough to make anything he wrote thereafter worth reading. Probably most worth reading are his acid short stories.

For this second collection O'Hara has written his first Foreword, a modest, touchy acknowledgment of his pleasure in other people's short stories and in his own. Then there are 35 stories in which the reader meets, briefly but none too briefly, about twice that many strictly American heels. Some are heels because they are young and dumb, some because they are trapped and tired. Some are pure heels, like the prep schoolteacher who enjoys frightening a 13-year-old boy. The Hollywood heels are the worst, comprising several of O'Hara's most excruciating women and zoological men. The author's nearest approach to liking (not very near) is reserved for: an old barber, a mild, hopeless Phi Beta Kappa, a prostitute, two husbands in love with other women, two wives in love with other men.

O'Hara's moral scheme is dependable as far as it goes. But his writing is limited by the excellence of his dislikes. His ear for heeltalk is so mercilessly accurate that some of the stories depend on that alone (e.g., "But one night Bernette happened to get a load of Peggy doing a rumba with Jackie, and from then on. See what I mean? Isn't she marvelous? She's really primitive."). The company so neatly evoked, is a company whose average intelligence rises only slightly above the threshold of human consciousness.

Though sad, the stories do not make the reader cry; though funny, they do not make him laugh; cumulatively they make him nervous. The bare, observant technique draws attention to itself and to its occasional flaws (the story Trouble in 1949 hinges on an exchange of car keys for which the author makes no provision). Possibly two prides—the Irishman's and the craftsman's—conspire to allow O'Hara no ambitious flops. But readers who are not reporters will wonder how anyone can write so well and yet so rarely try to write better.