Hope of Heaven - John O'Hara

Like his contemporary Nathanael West, John O'Hara was a master of the novella in an age when the fashion was for full-length novels.  So here he has to bundle the title novella with a load of his short stories.  The stories are all very well - typical New Yorker fare - but my interest is in the novella.

The year is 1938 - Hope of Heaven came out the same year as the much better known Pal Joey.  Malloy is a scriptwriter in Hollywood.  He has money, he has a girl - not a Hollywood girl but a sensible girl who works in a bookshop and who lives with the brother she has to all intents and purposes raised.  Then one day gets a call from a guy who claims to know his brother back home in Gibbsville.  This Don Miller wants to meet up with Malloy but never quite gets there, and when he does he turns out to be called Schumacher.  The real Don Miller lost his travel cheques; Schumacher found them and has been living off them ever since.  He thinks someone's after him, a detective hired by the insurance company.  Malloy has no interest in the guy or his problems.

Meanwhile Peggy's long-lost father pitches up, an ageing charmer with an anecdote for every occasion.  Malloy sees through the facade but takes a shine to him all the same.  And thus the seeds of tragedy are sown.

O'Hara is a tremendous writer, idiosyncratic yet amazingly readable.  His characters are all utterly convincing and he takes them down unexpected byways.  Seriously, strongly recommended.

Pal Joey - John O'Hara

Probably O'Hara's most famous work today, thanks to the musical and musical movie, Pal Joey is in fact an epistolary novella, only 70 pages long in this omnibus edition from the 1980s.  Having not read O'Hara before, I did not know what to expect.  I certainly didn't expect it to consist entirely of semi-literate letters.  I envisaged Updike; what I got reminded me strongly of Nathanael West, which suited me just fine.

We never learn Joey's last name, nor that of his sole correspondent and sometime pal Ted, who is doing much better than Joey is the swing era of 1938-41, which is when the book was written.  As a novella it relies more on nuance than plot and as such succeeds remarkably well.  I loved the interview with 'girl reporter' Melba, the sad little affair with wealthy widow Mavis, and above all the magnificent coda of the 14th letter, 'Reminiss', where Joey reflects sourly on what might (should) have been.  The line - "I even wear a little rug up front but so does the Grooner and Freddie Astare" - encapsulates it all.  Wonderful.