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TEN NORTH FREDERICK (408 PP) -John O'Hara -Random House ($3.95).

John O'Hara is a skilled writer who hates small towns and (intellectually speaking) has small chance of ever leaving one. The one he has chosen to hate and not permit his readers to leave is a place called Gibbsville, Pa. (he was born in Pottsville, Pa.). The same people are present in this Zenith-on-the-Schuylkill as lived when Julian English made his famous Appointment in Samarra. Old Dr. English is older and discouraged, but Novelist O'Hara, though older (50), is not discouraged.

His new novel is well organized. It begins with an important corpse, and the novelist's tactic is to take each of the mourners and riddle them with small shot. The corpse is that of Joseph Benjamin Chapin, and with the possible exception of the hero of Trollope's John Caldigate, he is the most greyly dull character to rear his trim, neat, empty head into modern literature.

Joe Chapin -as the various mourners reveal the story -once wanted to become President of the United States. But what with a man called Mike Slattery, who ran things in the county for the Republicans, Joe could not even make lieutenant governor. Although he went to Yale, his wife did not really love him. His children were no good. They understand that mother really killed him. He had taken to the booze. And so it goes.

Within Novelist O'Hara's chosen limits, there are to be found the expected narrative skill, and knowledge of a sort. The Gibbsville town assesser could not know more. O'Hara has a tape-recorder ear, a headwaiter's instinct for credit rating, and a preoccupation with different means of making love which, if supported by one of the great foundations, could put Dr. Kinsey right back among the gall wasps.

What is missing from Gibbsville? Human and intellectual qualities, the lack of which also disfigured the work of another U.S. writer who chose success and snobbery for his theme. O'Hara, like Scott Fitzgerald, is a writer of great natural talent but, like Fitzgerald, disappoints in the end for the poverty of his general ideas and tawdriness of his notions of a good life. It is odd that both of these very American writers should go into such an un-American swivet as to who sits below whose salt. Yet Fitzgerald, in his delighted fellow-travels with the rich, usually managed to weave a kind of verbal magic that seems today beyond O'Hara's means. In fact, O'Hara's entire account of the "aristocratic" Joe Chapin and his existence at No. 10 North Frederick is a remorselessly endless annotation of an epitaph to that depressing character called Clive:

What I like about Clive Is that he is

no longer alive.

There is a great deal to be said For being dead.

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