Behind Closed Doors

WAITING FOR WINTER by John O'Hara. 466 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Not many people come to a good end in the pages of John O'Hara. Lissome Andrea Cooper departs through a hotel window. Jimmy Rhodes dies of a precoital heart attack. Charles Kinsmith slips on the ice and expires after a bout of total recall. John Wesley Evans discovers that he is going blind. General Dixon L. Hightower quietly turns transvestite. Even Jack Harrison aboard his luxury yacht is oppressed by the thought that his crew plans to kill him.

O'Hara readers can confidently expect to be taken on a guided tour of a world where things happen. The language is clean and terse, and the code is more often amoral than immoral. Most O'Hara people live by the venerable adage, "If I don't do it, someone else will." Thus James Hatter has few compunctions about sleeping with his best friend's wife, and Starlet Natica Jackson even fewer about destroying a neighbor's marriage. A bitchy British countess in Hollywood sums up: "After all, everyone's naughty when the door is closed, don't you agree?"

O'Hara shifts with ease from the gilded but ghastly life of the West Coast and jet-set Manhattan to the grubby, proletarian reality of small towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His inept storekeeper, Lintzie, in Gibbsville and his Mrs. Kenneth R. Schumacher of Swedish Haven, Pa., are every bit as convincing as his faded movie stars and pop singers going to fat. Their predicaments, in fact, are often more convincing since O'Hara well knows how it is that bizarre events can occur in the most banal surroundings.

O'Hara, 61, is that rarity in contemporary U.S. letters, a writer who has never run dry. Even more unusual, he continues a large annual output of short stories, a field in which diminishing returns set in rapidly. Like Saul Bellow, O'Hara has a playwright inside him clamoring to get out, and this is reflected in his stories, which are often told almost entirely in dialogue. As an old pro, O'Hara is a methodical worker, using the summer months for short stories and execrable golf, and the fall, winter and spring for novels, hence the title Waiting for Winter. The stories in this new collection, ranging from a brief seven-page look at an ugly marriage to the novella-length Natica Jackson, add up to a fine job of summer's work.

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