Lately, Establishment fiction has become so vicious on its surface that critics have found it impossible to analyze the product in public. Instead, they have fallen to blathering about its sublimities or the right of the artist to perform nasty deeds in public vicariously. All that is evasion and nonsense. A book is written in words, and a critic must deal with those words. So: John O’Hara’s prose in Assembly is garnished throughout with four-letter words and Hortense Calisher rises from them only to more refined phrases equally scatological.
Assembly: A Collection of 26 New Stories, by John O’Hara. Random House, $5.95
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