Ten North Frederick
by John O'Hara
Summary
The novel opens at Joe Chapin's funeral in 1945, with Gibbsville, Pennsylvania performing its grief and privately totting up what it actually knew about him, and then runs the life backward and forward until the reader knows more than the town ever did.
Chapin is the best made surface in Gibbsville: old family, correct law practice, the house on North Frederick Street, a marriage to the formidable Edith that functions like a firm, and, nursed in secret with her full collaboration, an ambition so large he can barely say it aloud: he believes he should be President of the United States. O'Hara's cold brilliance is to make the ambition absurd and the man not: Joe has money, manners and rectitude, and no idea whatever how power actually moves, and the scene in which the local boss takes his measure, and his contribution, and gives him precisely nothing, is among the most quietly brutal in American political fiction.
What is left after the ambition dies is the family he made his monument: a son and daughter deformed by their parents' respectability, and then, late, a few months of actual happiness with Kate Drummond, his daughter's friend, half his age, the one person who ever met the man instead of the surface. The whiskey does the rest.
Around four hundred pages, plain, procedural and merciless. Readers who start here usually go on to Appointment in Samarra, his 1934 debut set in the same town, the other pillar of the Gibbsville books.
Best for readers who want the American establishment autopsied by its most exact chronicler, and a portrait of a marriage as a mutual life sentence.
Historical Context & Significance
Ten North Frederick won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1956 and was among the ten bestselling novels of its year, the peak of John O'Hara's official standing. It also drew the obscenity fire that followed him everywhere: the novel's sexual frankness got it banned and prosecuted in several jurisdictions, which did the sales no harm.
Gibbsville is Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the coal country town O'Hara mined for decades of novels and several hundred New Yorker stories, building a social ledger of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, old money and new, that critics have compared to Balzac's. The 1958 film gave Gary Cooper one of his last major roles as Chapin.
O'Hara's reputation is the era's strangest stock chart: enormous in his lifetime, then dumped wholesale by the academy, which found the surfaces all there was, and periodically revived since by writers, who know how hard those surfaces are to make. The stories have aged best; this is the strongest of the late novels.