The Pennsylvania Story

A RAGE TO LIVE (590 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($3.75).

In June 1913, on the tenth anniversary of his wedding, Gentleman-Farmer Sidney Tate lunched on Irish stew at his club and took stock of his marriage. He was a mild-mannered New York socialite who had come to Fort Penn, Pa. to marry rich, handsome, socially top-flight Grace Caldwell and had settled down to a provincial life of quiet opulence. His survey satisfied him:

"This is a good marriage. I love my wife and I am confident she loves me...She loves me in bed, and she never shows the slightest interest in any other men..." Four years later, Grace Tate made love to the son of a local Irish politician in the back seat of her car. When people found out, as people will, the Tate marriage was ruined and so was Grace's life.

Meet the People. That is the whole story of A Rage to Live, John Henry O'Hara's new novel, his first in eleven years. But it is not O'Hara's whole intent. Like his earlier taut and febrile novels (Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8), A Rage to Live is shot through with enough gratuitous sex to get itself talked about. But unlike them it attempts the kind of large-scale social portraiture which could easily be the framework of the Great American Novel. Rage is not that. Its wide-lensed look at U.S. small-city life in the first two decades of this century treats the reader to some shrewd but merely surface revelations. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Fort Penn politicians made shady deals and occasionally put figureheads in office, or that its rich were snobs and its newly rich social climbers. What may surprise them is that Novelist O'Hara documents these commonplace facts of life with so many tedious and often pointless instances.

Nevertheless, A Rage to Live is peppered with evidences of O'Hara's technical writing skill. He still has an ear for dialogue that makes his characters' conversation as credible as if it were overheard, whether they are talking in a brothel or planning a dinner at home. His gallery is extensive (housewives, doctors, politicians, businessmen, lovers, prostitutes) and the people seem as true and alive as if the reader had just met them. But Novelist O'Hara seems satisfied with only a casual-meeting knowledge of his people. Reading A Rage to Live is almost like exchanging slightly malicious gossip about one's home town over a drink in a bar. Everyone is discussed but no one is really understood. Like all hot gossip, it is oddly exciting, strangely unsatisfying.

Evening with an Album. The major defect of A Rage to Live is the lack of final meaning, of implicit comment on human experience by which the reader subconsciously finds the true measure of all fiction. Grace Tate's sudden sex hungers which become shabby love affairs, the fictionally fortuitous death of her husband soon after he discovers her unfaithfulness, the death of her small son, and the social pressure that makes her leave Fort Penn to go to live in New York--all these and other central matters are poured but never molded. The passage of more than 20 years in a time of great social change and a look at two generations of Pennsylvania society have little more relevance than a nostalgic evening with a family album. A Pennsylvanian himself, 44-year-old John O'Hara has a fine visual recollection of his fellow citizens, and a shrewd, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes sardonic regard for their surface irregularities, but their inner stresses are too seldom exposed. Like most of O'Hara's books and stories, A Rage to Live makes swift, frequently exciting reading. Even in their disappointment, readers will know they have been in the company of a writer.

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