What Love ls And Is Not

THE INSTRUMENT by John O'Hara. 297 pages. Random House. $5.95.

When John O'Hara drove up to Random House's Italian Renaissance parking lot in his grey Rolls-Royce and turned over his latest instant novel, he delivered the goods once more. The Instrument ranks considerably below the early and best O'Hara, but it is an effective short novel, cynical beyond redemption, pertinent as a suicide note.

The title is a typical O'Hara stunt, The Instrument refers explicitly to the way in which Yancey ("Yank") Lucas becomes the literary tool of an actress. It also refers to Yank's penis, which has no conscience whatsoever and contributes to the deaths of two of his bed partners. The book tells the story of Yank's sudden rise to the top of the American theater and his possession by the gifts that put him there.

Zena Gollum, an unMethodical actress of great power and appetite, takes an instant liking to Yank's play and to Yank. Following the pattern set by virtually all other O'Hara women, she is in a hotel room with him a few hours after they met. But after a brief affair, Yank decides that he will not put himself to the tests of theatrical glory and aggression in bed. He runs away to Vermont, begins his next play, and starts looking for other women.

The society divorcee wants a commitment and cuts Yank down as loveless when she gets none. The funny, lewd college girls only wants $50 a throw but dies in a car smashup. The local postmistress tries to seal, stamp and deliver Yank to herself, but he refuses. He stays loyal to the only thing he believes in--his talent. Then O'Hara delievers the famous left hook, Zena Gollum takes a bottle of sleeping pills and has the last word on Yank as a human being: "Dear Yank: thanks for nothing."

The Instrument succeeds for all the old reasons. O'Hara eavesdrops on speech like an electronic listening device. His authentication--buttons on clothes, furnishings in rooms--creates reality. Above all, O'Hara's small imagined world of specific conflict spreads like an opening hand to touch a much larger one. This novel about a writer's success and the husbanding of his emotions becomes a dialogue between John O'Hara and his reader.

Despite plenty of recent evidence to the contrary (The Lockwood Concern, Waiting for Winter), O'Hara knows the difference between sex and love, while Yank doesn't. In fact, O'Hara shows the tension between sex and love, between lechery and devotion, operating like a knife on his characters. But by instinct or insight, O'Hara cannot glorify heterosexual love and its institutionalization in monogamy. Gamy as ever, cruelly vital, the anti-intellectual O'Hara has written an intellectual novel in disguise, about what love is and is not.

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