O'Hara, Untrimmed

THE FARMERS HOTEL (153 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($2).

Novelist John O'Hara is an expert at pinning down two kinds of people: those who get hurt easily and those who have a genius for hurting them. His victims and victimizers usually meet in scenes charged with emotional or physical violence, frequently both, and almost always the heel has a field day at the expense of someone better but weaker (Butterfield 8, Appointment in Samarra, scores of tough, tense short stories). Usually O'Hara makes it plain that heels annoy him almost as strongly as he is drawn to them. In his last novel, the bestselling A Rage to Live, he was almost as sympathetic to the betraying wife as he was to the hurt husband.

O'Hara's new novel, The Farmers Hotel, is news for two reasons: 1) at 46, he has arrived at an almost Saroyanesque love of kindness, hatred of cruelty and stupidity; 2) this is his poorest novel.

When Howard and Martha stopped at the small-town Pennsylvania hotel one snowy evening, it was only to make a phone call. They were both fortyish and married, though not to each other. But they were in love, the real thing at last. Howard Pomfret speaks to Martha just the way O'Hara has learned to write from Ernest Hemingway: "It was so long ago, Girl. I don't want to remember her, I want to be with you. You're my last love, my final love." A few drinks, car trouble, and the blizzard outside decide the lovers to have dinner at the hotel. They are joined by other guests: some down-at-heel vaudevillians, a local doctor, a truck driver with too many drinks in him, the garrulous hotel owner and his assistants.

While the storm rages outside, all is good fellowship within. Then the truck driver, boorish and a little drunk, insults one of the vaudeville girls, quarrels with Pomfret and quits the party. Later, when Martha and Pomfret drive off in the snowstorm, the truck driver is waiting for them beside the road, deliberately smashes into them from the rear and kills them.

The Farmers Hotel is not only as pointless as any other death on the highway, it is also something O'Hara has rarely been: dull. If he was really trying to say something about love, violence and the irony of life, it never reached his typewriter. Not too many years ago, Writer O'Hara would have trimmed these 153 pages down to about 20.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.