Our Town

A FAMILY PARTY (64 pp.] -;John O'Hara; -Random House ($1.95).

John O'Hara's talent as a novelist runs to stenographic reporting and, as any reader of his bestselling Ten North Frederick knows, he reports most expertly on Pennsylvania small towns whose very ordinary people all seem to lead extraordinary sex lives. O'Hara fans can now get, between hard covers, one of his minor magazine stories that proves that he can exercise his talent with his left hand. It also proves that he can suppress--at least for the space of 64 pages--his obsessive preoccupation with sex.

A Family Party purports to be a "stenographic report" of a speech in honor of a leading citizen, Dr. Sam Merritt. Dr. Sam has put in 40 years of selfless service, and his friends are giving him a dinner at the local hotel to show that they love and honor him. (O'Hara is himself the son of a small-town doctor.) The speech made by Dr. Merritt's friend, one Albert Shoemaker, has the uncanny accuracy of sentimentality and vernacular inflection that perhaps only O'Hara can command. Anyone who has lived in a small town can read it with an absolute guarantee that it will make him as homesick as the smell of leaves burning on an autumn evening.

There is Dr. Sam, a little uncomfortable at being praised so, now and then signaling his friend to lay off. Nothing doing. Bert Shoemaker recalls Doc's youth, the old days when he worked at the local drugstore, his herculean labors with the injured the day of the great train wreck, how he raised funds for the nearby hospital, how soft he was about collecting bills from the poor. Brusquely, yet delicately, Speaker Shoemaker talks about the doctor's great bereavement -the beloved wife whose mind gave way after she lost two babies. A Family Party is slight, but it was not intended to be more. It is sentimental, but its quota of sentimentality is precisely the dollop that is a standard ingredient in the life of almost anyone's "our town."

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