Tragedy Off Stage

HOPE or HEAVEN--John O'Hara--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

John O'Hara's first two novels impressed critics for two reasons. They revealed his command of native dialect and his willingness to enter into the minds of recognizable U. S. types to see what made them tick. Thus, in Appointment in Samarra, he explored the consciousness of a Pennsylvania Cadillac dealer who committed suicide; in Butter field 8, the crossed-up life of a New York speakeasy girl who had better reasons for letting herself go.

What made these people destroy themselves? Author O'Hara did not so much solve the problems he set for himself as simply worry them apart. He examined the friendships of his victims, their financial jams, their new & old love affairs, their prejudices, inhibitions, the tormented jokes they cracked about their difficulties. In the course of his investigations he built up unsparing portraits of their environments --a pick-up world where nobody understood anybody else, where people imagined crimes and perversions in the back-ground of casual acquaintances, where they confided in strangers and insulted their friends, where enough brutal monstrosities turned up to give substance to their fears and suspicions. Readers might feel that Author O'Hara had not answered all the questions about his Glorias and Julians, but they had to admit that he had followed them through their hangovers, into their bedrooms and breakdowns, and left no doors closed behind him.

Last week John O'Hara's third novel suggested that he was beginning to close some of the doors. Hope of Heaven has as much violence and as much hard drinking as his earlier books. It has a typical O'Hara hero--a 35-year-old Hollywood writer who sports $35 shoes, $7.50 socks, a $2,200 automobile, and who is in love with a brisk little bookstore clerk. It has its murder, its two ambiguous strangers, its undercurrent of tension accompanying commonplace scenes like luncheons and parties. But all consequential happenings seem to take place off stage. Readers are told a good deal about the intoxications of Jim Malloy and Peggy Henderson, but not so much about their hangovers; a good deal about their transports but not so much about their quarrels. And the wisecracks that seemed in O'Hara's earlier books to be wrenched from the speakers like snarls of pain seem in Hope of Heaven pat and smug, more pretentious than pathic.

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