Books, Arts & Manners: The Straight Dope

Collected Stories of John O’Hara, edited and with an introduction by Frank Mac-Shane (Random House, 414 pp., $19.95)

He was a prose statistician, a literary census-taker who told us how we dressed and what we drank and ate and drove: “The fire companies bought American LaFrances and Whites. The physicians bought Franklins and Fords, Buicks and Dodges. (The Franklin was air-cooled; the Buick was supposed to be a great hillclimber.)” He was not so naïve as to assume you are what you own, but he knew that to some extent fiction is like forensics: You start with the facts. Motives will emerge.

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Thomas Mallon

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Collected Stories of John O’Hara, edited and with an introduction by Frank Mac-Shane (Random House, 414 pp., $19.95)

He was a prose statistician, a literary census-taker who told us how we dressed and what we drank and ate and drove: “The fire companies bought American LaFrances and Whites. The physicians bought Franklins and Fords, Buicks and Dodges. (The Franklin was air-cooled; the Buick was supposed to be a great hillclimber.)” He was not so naïve as to assume you are what you own, but he knew that to some extent fiction is like forensics: You start with the facts. Motives will emerge.