Murderer's Musings

OURSELVES TO KNOW (408 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($4.95).

Perhaps irked by critics who have patronized him for his ability to write flawless (and endless) dialogue, John O'Hara has lately turned to a more inward sort of conversation--the colloquy a lonely man carries on with himself. The protagonist of his new novel is a rich and solitary Pennsylvania landowner who, past 50, marries an 18-year-old girl and eventually murders her. Why did he do it? For a long time, the reader is not told, while the narrator sifts the aging murderer's memories for the quirks of mind and the twists of fate that led to the crisis. The surface answer to this whydunit is that the young wife had an insatiable appetite for men, and that her husband killed her in cold, obsessional jealousy. But it is finally clear that the victim whom Robert Millhouser really loathed and destroyed was Robert Millhouser himself.

Consistent but Shallow. With his usual sharp and overly detailed sense of time, place, speech and custom, O'Hara sets the scene. The events are dramatic enough--the murder itself, a near lynching, and several seductions (not nearly as many, though, as in recent O'Hara novels). But the real drama, revealed piecemeal and with a strange detachment, takes place in Millhouser's own soul. He was born in the 1850s, idolized his father, and never really recovered from the father's death shortly after the Civil War. His mother, a strong but withdrawn woman, could not make up the loss. When Millhouser leaves for college he is starved for love, and he finds a substitute in an absorbing friendship with a brilliant young man a few years his senior. Innocence in the 1870s is hardly more surprising than blue eyes, and it is not until they have traveled through Europe together for several months that Millhouser discovers his friend to be a homosexual. He returns in dismay to Pennsylvania and takes up a quiet life in his mother's house.

The author has picked a difficult sort of hero, a man whose birth, so to speak, has left him unnaturally sensitive but permanently exhausted. Millhouser has been made thoroughly credible; his character is consistent as far as the reader is able to peer into it. But the view, not deep enough, is too often dull.

Understanding but Awkward. The trouble may be that Novelist O'Hara has hedged his commitment to interior dialogue. He strains Millhouser's musings through a narrator, a young man who begins to talk with the murderer out of curiosity and continues the conversations because he hopes to write his master's thesis in form of a novel. The device is awkward, and the frequent asides to the reader are irritating. A scene in which the young man fancies he js in communication with the shade of Millhouser's mother is as embarrassing as any in recent fiction.

The author's point is presumably that the narrator arrives at the beginning of self-knowledge as he participates in Millhouser's own attempts to understand himself. But the young man with a master's thesis in mind is too solidly fleshed to be a mere literary convention, too ectoplasmic to be a real character. Neither of this world nor decently out of it, he hurts what should have been a good novel.

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