HELLBOX

Successor to Pipe Night these collected stories of O'Hara's show his precision and technical ability, and seemingly easy effectiveness. Again the characters provide their own backgrounds in their dialogue; again conclusions are left to the reader; and again the short story is compressed into telling character and situation episodes. Here are the sharp focus details of middle age, of various types of heels, of kids and their mishandling by elders, of color lines, odd personalities, women, marriage, men on the prowl, of the effects of success, of Hollywood and points east and the people who live there. From the New Yorker and elsewhere, this sustains the author's reputation for catching the contemporary scene in terms of the persons in the foreground.