Women and the Mirror of the World

Elizabeth Appleton, by John O’Hara.Random, $4.95 The Greater Darkness, by DavidRubin. Farrar, $4.95 Ehrengard, by Isak Dinesen. Random, $3.95 A thoroughly disinterested observer might easily say that all novels are about the high enterprises of this world, complicated by adultery. Herodotus, regarding the rape of Helen, said, “Well, once it was done, they could have forgotten about it.” But no poet, least of all Homer, and no novelist, far from forgetting, ever quits looking for the Helen in things. In the trust two people place in each other, however insignificant they may be in the drift of history, the novelist can test the holding strength of extensive fabrics. John O’Hara locates his Helen in a small Pennsylvania college, which, like Haverford (as his characters say), “has traditional connections with Harvard.” David Rubin, a new novelist, studies womankind in modern India. And the late Isak Dinesen, the she-wizard of modern letters, has left us a final romance from that Gothic North she invented a half-century ago.

Mr. O’Hara’s art is by now perfect. It has always been a master’s style, tough, alert to detail, and so spare in its drawing that the famous restraint Hemingway agonized over for so long and so publicly ought in all fairness to be mounted prominently in the record as an achievement which Mr. O’Hara has accomplished with impressive labor and no fanfare at all. Where Hemingway offered us exotic and unusual examples of human endurance, Mr. O’Hara deals with the ordinary: living room, sidewalk, automobile.

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Guy Davenport

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Elizabeth Appleton, by John O’Hara.Random, $4.95 The Greater Darkness, by DavidRubin. Farrar, $4.95 Ehrengard, by Isak Dinesen. Random, $3.95 A thoroughly disinterested observer might easily say that all novels are about the high enterprises of this world, complicated by adultery. Herodotus, regarding the rape of Helen, said, “Well, once it was done, they could have forgotten about it.” But no poet, least of all Homer, and no novelist, far from forgetting, ever quits looking for the Helen in things. In the trust two people place in each other, however insignificant they may be in the drift of history, the novelist can test the holding strength of extensive fabrics. John O’Hara locates his Helen in a small Pennsylvania college, which, like Haverford (as his characters say), “has traditional connections with Harvard.” David Rubin, a new novelist, studies womankind in modern India. And the late Isak Dinesen, the she-wizard of modern letters, has left us a final romance from that Gothic North she invented a half-century ago.

Mr. O’Hara’s art is by now perfect. It has always been a master’s style, tough, alert to detail, and so spare in its drawing that the famous restraint Hemingway agonized over for so long and so publicly ought in all fairness to be mounted prominently in the record as an achievement which Mr. O’Hara has accomplished with impressive labor and no fanfare at all. Where Hemingway offered us exotic and unusual examples of human endurance, Mr. O’Hara deals with the ordinary: living room, sidewalk, automobile.