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(More customer reviews)This is the John O'Hara story that you should read first if you've never before had the opportunity to savour the works of this brilliant American novelist. This one is really of novella length, a page-turner that you can breeze though in one evening.
Here, A enterprising man re-opens an old hotel in a rural hamlet. His first guests are abruptly compelled to stop in, mostly as a result of bad weather. They're an odd blend of personalities including a noxious and vulgar truck driver, a show girl, and a semi-aristocratic couple who are engaged in an illicit affair. In the small bar, the alcohol flows.
As the evening progresses, the guests help out with the cooking and some of them become pals while others prefer to remain at arm's-length. Before the night is over, though, life pretty much changes for everyone involved.
John O'Hara, (1905-1970), was the master of the American novel. You know every one of his characters from, mostly negative, experiences with people which you've encountered in your own life. And O'Hara has one major redeeming quality -- he doesn't care in the least who he kills off in his stories which sets his work apart from all others. His humor typically takes on a tragic quality which most readers ultimately come to love in a shake-your-head sort of way. A final key caveat of O'Hara's notable skill was that he knew precisely how to smoothly convey, trivialize, and exploit the dubious activities and peccadillos of human beings in small-town America.
"The Farmer's Hotel" (1951) is a superbly classic John O'Hara work which yields the unvarnished truth about America and Americans as no other author could do until Grace Metallious came along, years later, with "Peyton Place".
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They were strangers - driven together by a blinding snowstorm. Here, as only John O'Hara can tell it, is a novel of men and women, caught in a pressure cooker of passion and violence.
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