The Middle Depths

SERMONS AND SODA-WATER (3 vols., totaling 328 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($5.95).

This collection of three related novellas is John O'Hara's best work in years. The stories remind one strongly of the author's early novels, and not only because the suicide of Julian English, the hero of Appointment in Samarra, is an offstage incident in one of them. The prose has the great clarity of all of O'Hara's writing, and an economy of expression that he has seemed afraid to trust in such vast recent novels as From the Terrace and Ten North Frederick.

Attractive Reticence. In his preface, O'Hara mentions the weight factor in bookselling and hopes that readers will not apply the heft test to his small volumes. He need have no fears; done up in a slipcase, the novellas are not only handsome but hefty, and the publisher is able to ask as much for about 60,000 words of text as he does for 260,000. Regrettably, O'Hara also reports that he is working on his heftiest novel yet (previous record: 897 pages in From the Terrace), apparently ignoring the fact that his jumbo works are not as good as his short ones. The outstanding qualities of these stories are matchless dialogue and--since there is much that dialogue cannot express directly--an attractive measure of reticence.

They are narrated by Jim Malloy (who appeared in earlier novels), an O'Hara-like man who has been a reporter and pressagent and who, in middle age, is a successful novelist. In the first volume, The Girl on the Baggage Truck, he is a major character, a young publicity man who avoids, mostly by luck, becoming the pet poodle of an aging actress. Malloy is an observer in the next book, Imagine Kissing Pete, concerning an adulterous marriage that worked better than expected. There is a hint in this one of sentimentality, a quality to which the 20th century reacts as the 19th did to sex--with outward shock masking secret delight--and in O'Hara's hands the flavor is pleasant.

The Final Condition. The third story, We're Friends Again, is elegiac; Malloy is moved by the death of a meddlesome woman to reflect forbearingly on his own life and that of his acquaintances. At the end of the book, the woman's husband. Malloy's closest friend, tells him that he loved his wife deeply. "On my way home," the narrator relates, looking into the middle depths, "I realized that until then I had not known him at all. It was not a discovery to cause me dismay. What did he know about me? What, really, can any of us know about any of us, and why must we make such a thing of loneliness when it is the final condition of us all?"

As this statement suggests, Novelist O'Hara is not one of those few who can function in the ooze of the soul's floor; he works best at middle depth, and in a story composed mostly of dialogue, that is where he must stay. It is not a bad place for any writer.

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