"In Hemingway’s fiction everyone who matters—author, protagonist, reader—is politely assumed to be a member, or at least a tributary, of the club. For O’Hara, privilege is rooted in bigotry, and he’s tacky enough to say so. This demystifying attitude—this realism in matters of class—sets O’Hara apart from his great hero and fellow Irish American, F. Scott Fitzgerald. If O’Hara had written a Gatsby, or Wolfsheim, it would be from the inside, not through the innocent WASP eyes of Nick Carraway. We’d know exactly where the money came from and how it got laundered. With O’Hara there’s no Vaseline on the lens. If he had written The Great Gatsby, we’d see Gatsby and Daisy sharing a cigarette in bed."
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 17:42:45 +0000
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