From the Terrace

This story is wonderful; I live in the town where it was filmed. Everyone in our small town worked at the steel mill until its closing.

I've only just started reading this book, having just finished O'Hara's flat-out fantastic "Appointment in Samarra" so I don't have a review yet per se (although it's great so far), I just have a question: where the heck is the introduction by Budd Schulberg?? I've worked in bookstores for many years and have flipped through several copies of this book and have never once seen a copy with the introduction in it. I like Schulberg, I'd be interested in what he has to say. Be nice if the publishers would put the thing in one of these days . . . still, I shouldn't complain, I guess, they could've included the introduction and forgot the book.

John O'Hara once said that one of his driving instincts in writing was to chronicle the first half of the 20th Century. A great deal of his large body of work does just this. "From the Terrace" is not only one of his best novels, but is sound history as well. We are introduced to poor Alfred Eaton who overcomes a bad childhood to become a success as an adult to become .... perhaps what he was meant to be all along. It's part Man in a Gray Flannel Suit and part Greek Tragedy. As to what it chronicles: the old boy WASP network of prep school / Harvard or Yale or Princeton / club life. One's early life provides networking forever for the fortunate upper class white male in that upper class. One sees how these same males get tapped during WW2 to fill the better positions opening up in Washington thanks to the war effort. O'Hara excels at the tiny details that expand in your mind to tell an entire story. His dialogue (particularly between men and women) sounds true. Given the time in which he wrote, O'Hara got away with a lot of explicit sex. The lead character commits adultery and is all the more happy for it. If you've seen the movie with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, you should know that the book does not end with Paul Newman walking down a Manhattan street happy to be able to marry his mistress. In the book, he marries a second time, his naval career ends, and he finds his life taking a new turn.

I was interested in reading this novel after seeing the Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward movie on American Movie Classics one evening. To my surprise and great pleasure, the book is far better than the movie -- although it doesn't hurt one's appreciation of the characters to imagine those two talented movie stars speaking their dialogue. At nearly 1000 pages in length, the book requires a major commitment on the part of the reader, but O'Hara never disappoints. His story moves along at just the right pace, and the growth -- or lack thereof -- of his characters is a revelation. I particularly recommend this work to anyone who seriously wants to write a historical novel, because its structure and style are very instructive of how to work in the genre to maximum effect. This book introduced me to a writer whose work is no longer very accessible, either in libraries or on web sites such as these -- and more's the pity for it. What appeared to be a dry, overwritten potboiler of no special distinction turned out to be an engrossing story of one man's desperate search for the love that had always eluded him. I recommend this novel enthusiastically to anyone who finds contemporary popular fiction dissatisfying. And for the average reader, the best part of finishing this book is the knowledge that there's more of John O'Hara's work yet to be discovered.

Long before there was a Jackie Collins, a Harold Robbins, or any of the others, John O'Hara was proving, again and again, that the sins and secrets of the so-called "beautiful people" could be presented with style and subtlety. He proved this in "Butterfield 8" and "Ten North Frederick," but never better than in "From the Terrace." Alfred Eaton, his driving, driven anti-hero, ranks with his earlier Joey Evans in terms of being a rogue with style. You like and envy him while despising everything he stands for. More than anything, though, you pity him. You realise, long before he himself does, that what's driving him is his desire to outshine his domineering father and over-achieving older brother, dead of meningitis at age eleven. Alfred Eaton is a rogue, but one with a conscience, something he doesn't realise ultil it's almost too late. A stunning character study and a stunning book, which, some 41 years after it was written, still packs a wallop.