In the Broad Stream.

John. O’Hara is a serious novelist who wishes with a great deal of yearning intensity to be taken seriously. The perfervid quality of his desire sometimes makes him extremely self-conscious. He is apt to press for attention, particularly in his statements about other writers. His sexual passages sometimes scream at the reader; itisasifhe were saying, “Look, I’m the only honest writer about sex in America.” But in Ten North Frederick (Random House, $3.95) O’Hara is disciplined beyond his former wont. This is well-rounded fiction, relaxed and mournful even in its most unpleasant realism. As a story, it is filled with a sense of a whole community, but it is also intensely personal. The skeletons shake and rattle in the boarded-up attic closets of the Chapin house at 10 North Frederick Street, Gibbsville, Pa. Gibbsville is, of course, a thinly disguised version of Mr. O’Hara’s home town of Pottsville, a community which contains just about everything in its mixed middle-class and proletarian microcosm.

In Ten North Frederick Mr. O’Hara takes an extremely long view. This is a three-generation story, and at times it assumes the quality of a parade of horrors. The first of Mr. O ‘Hara’s Chapins, Ben and Charlotte, had the bad luck to produce a couple of stillborn babies, one of them obviously a monster. This naturally served to warp Charlotte’s relationship to Joe Chapin, her only normal son, and it set Ben, her bewildered husband, to haunting a red light district in Philadelphia for his lugubrious satisfactions. Joe Chapin had better luck than his father, for his plain wife, Edith, believed with an unspontaneous solicitude in making her marriage a planned and charted success. The trouble with Edith was her possessiveness, which drove her to crazy lengths (and a silly revenge) in the effort to own her husband completely. In the end Edith’s selfishness betrays her; she alienates both her husband and her children, Ann and Joby.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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John. O’Hara is a serious novelist who wishes with a great deal of yearning intensity to be taken seriously. The perfervid quality of his desire sometimes makes him extremely self-conscious. He is apt to press for attention, particularly in his statements about other writers. His sexual passages sometimes scream at the reader; itisasifhe were saying, “Look, I’m the only honest writer about sex in America.” But in Ten North Frederick (Random House, $3.95) O’Hara is disciplined beyond his former wont. This is well-rounded fiction, relaxed and mournful even in its most unpleasant realism. As a story, it is filled with a sense of a whole community, but it is also intensely personal. The skeletons shake and rattle in the boarded-up attic closets of the Chapin house at 10 North Frederick Street, Gibbsville, Pa. Gibbsville is, of course, a thinly disguised version of Mr. O’Hara’s home town of Pottsville, a community which contains just about everything in its mixed middle-class and proletarian microcosm.

In Ten North Frederick Mr. O’Hara takes an extremely long view. This is a three-generation story, and at times it assumes the quality of a parade of horrors. The first of Mr. O ‘Hara’s Chapins, Ben and Charlotte, had the bad luck to produce a couple of stillborn babies, one of them obviously a monster. This naturally served to warp Charlotte’s relationship to Joe Chapin, her only normal son, and it set Ben, her bewildered husband, to haunting a red light district in Philadelphia for his lugubrious satisfactions. Joe Chapin had better luck than his father, for his plain wife, Edith, believed with an unspontaneous solicitude in making her marriage a planned and charted success. The trouble with Edith was her possessiveness, which drove her to crazy lengths (and a silly revenge) in the effort to own her husband completely. In the end Edith’s selfishness betrays her; she alienates both her husband and her children, Ann and Joby.