Scheherazade's Thousandth

THE HORSE KNOWS THE WAY by John O'Hara. 429 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In the latest of those churlish, wistful prefaces that he has taken to writing, John O'Hara seems to be saying that he is going to quit doing short stories until he is properly thanked for his novels.

This announcement, in which one of the best U.S. authors now active contrives to sound like a ten-year-old refusing to eat his dinner, is followed by a tasteful discussion of John O'Hara's very large income. The effect is that of a wealthy car dealer boasting in the locker room of the second-best country club in Gibbsville, Pa.

Bombast aside, however, O'Hara's decision to stop writing short stories for a while seems wise. The Horse Knows the Way (the title has overtones of weariness and self-mockery) is his fourth large collection of short stories in four years. O'Hara's imagination is astonishingly agile, and his view of society and psychology is much broader than it is generally supposed to be. These stories, taken by themselves, have the sting of fresh work by a fine writer. But he has written so many stories that his fresh, vigorous writing is debased by an illusion of sameness. O'Hara sketches a middle-aged couple preparing for bed after a party, seeing each other, suddenly, with sour clarity. He has used such a moment before, often enough that it seems a device. So do the working parts of other stories, even though they still work beautifully.

He is quitting--for the moment--while he is still very much ahead. One of the best stories in the new collection lacks any trace of sameness. It is about the suicide of a bass-fiddle player, and with beautiful simplicity it conveys a sense of sadness and longing more intense than any work of O'Hara's since Appointment in Samarra.

Gnats & Cigar Smoke. O'Hara is right in thinking that his standing as a novelist has been misjudged. But critics have some excuse for slighting him: his last three novels have been poor. Ourselves to Know, a period piece, did not work very well; Elizabeth Apple ton was insignificant; and The Big Laugh collapsed in a foosh of elderly cigar smoke.

It is generally admitted that Samarra and Butterfield 8 are brilliant, but they were done so long ago that they are no defense for their author, gnat-bitten by reviewers in middle age. What is not admitted is that A Rage to Live, Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace are excellent novels. From the Terrace. the best of the three, stands almost alone in U.S. fiction as a thoroughly successful study of a man reaching for the highest financial power. The novel is 897 pages long; it lacks drama and is built, like most lives, entirely of minutiae. It moves slowly and reaches no climax; yet at the end, when O'Hara has shown why his able, moneyed hero has lost the game of command, the reader feels strongly and unexpectedly moved.

Story & Sex. It is not hard to see why these novels were underrated. They were bestsellers, full of story and sex and the unfolding of generations; it was assumed that they must be ladies' fiction. Their author dealt with surfaces, with qualities of speech, cuts of coat, school and club allegiances. He refused to psychologize. The easy conclusion was that his work must be shallow. The fact that some of it was shallow eased critical consciences; O'Hara could be passed off as a hack with a good ear and an electric typewriter.

But what O'Hara is trying is not easy but enormously difficult. It is to define a society by a skilled charting of its surfaces. But such surfaces, stretched across the vast unsupported span of a novel, run the risk of a complete collapse. O'Hara's successes outnumber and outweigh his collapses. His pugnacious preface, the reader hopes, may be read as a pledge that he will continue to take his high risks.

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