Gibbsville, PA Book

...I have deliberately attempted to record the first half of the century in fictional forms but with the quasi-historical aspect that, say, Dickens achieved. It is all here—and more of it is there than anyone else has put down or will put down.
—John O'Hara, from the dust jacket of Gibbsville, PA: The Classic Stories

Gibbsville, PA collects 53 of John O'Hara's stories about his fictional Pennsylvania town and its environs, deep in coal-mining territory, in the early 20th Century. Slice after slice of life after life, written over a span of more than thirty years... this hearty meatloaf of a book weighs almost three pounds (and yes, I did actually weigh it). The first few short stories are very short, little more than vignettes, but O'Hara stretches out more later, and all of these works are, individually, pretty quick reads.

Now, I have written many times about my love for speculative fiction, for the sort of mind-expanding tales that refuse to be confined to ordinary reality. O'Hara's stories are by no means sf—as advertised, they're a lot closer to history than to fantasy. Mired in the mundane, O'Hara mines the minutiae of ordinary people's lives... Gibbsville, PA is, if anything, relentlessly realistic.

I can't even remember where I first heard about this book—it's just one of several dozen I transferred to my to-read list in Goodreads without comment or fanfare in October 2008, just a few months after I joined.

Nevertheless, this massive collection held my interest throughout its length.

A lot of that is because of how intensely O'Hara evokes bygone experiences, some of which—many of which—I recall myself, since I grew up in a small(ish) town not unlike Gibbsville, in (but never of) coal-mining country, just one state down and to the left of Pennsylvania. If you've ever worn corduroy pants, for example, you too will never forget "the woop-woop of my new breeches every time I took a step," (from "It Must Have Been Spring," p.31).

Of course, and perhaps unavoidably, O'Hara calls up memories I did not want to revisit, too, parts of the past that no respectable reader would want to resurrect. For example... sure, it's from 1934, but even so the early and casual use of the N-word in "It Must Have Been Spring" (p.33) was jarring. O'Hara does not employ that sort of language frequently, though, thank goodness—although that's mostly, I suspect, because Gibbsville as a whole is a very white town, where immigrants of European extraction can usually only exercise their bigotry on immigrants of somewhat-different European extractions.

*

"The Doctor's Son," the first longer work, takes place in the fall of 1918, when the narrator isgetting ready to go to school, which had not yet closed down.
—"The Doctor's Son," p.38It's a pandemic story that echoes eerily today, as we are—slowly, slowly—reopening schools closed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 1918 influenza pandemic was a recurring theme in Gibbsville, PA. Another telling passage, from later in the book:It was a terrible thing when Carl passed on during the influenza epidemic. George could not even get leave to come home for the funeral. In fact, there was no real funeral; the churches and theaters and all such public gatherings were prohibited during the epidemic; the schools were closed, and you could not even buy a soda at a soda fountain. The death rate was shockingly high in the mining villages, but death by the wholesale did not affect George Dalrymple nearly so much as the passing of funny little Carl{...}
—"Jurge Dulrumple," p.282

The flu wasn't O'Hara's only focus, of course. Consider, for example, O'Hara's opinion of Prohibition—which isn't even what the story's about:The law had been passed with a "noble" but nevertheless cynical disregard of men's right to drink. It was a law that had been imposed on some who took pleasure in drinking by some who did not. And when the law was an instant failure, it was not admitted to be a failure by those who had imposed it. They fought to retain the law in spite of its immediate failure and its proliferating corruption, and they fought as hard as they would have for a law that had been an immediate success. They gained no recruits to their own way; they had only deserters, who were not brave deserters but furtive ones; there was no honest mutiny but only grumbling and small disobediences. And we grew up listening to the grumbling, watching the small disobediences; laughing along when the grumbling was intentionally funny, imitating the small disobediences in other ways besides the customs of drinking. It was not only a cynical disregard for a law of the land; the law was eventually changed. Prohibition, the zealots' attempt to force total abstinence on a temperate nation, made liars of a hundred million men and cheats of their children; the West Point cadets who cheated in examinations, the basketball players who connived with gamblers, the thousands of uncaught cheats in the high schools and colleges. We had grown up and away from our earlier esteem of God and country and valor, and had matured at a moment when riches were vanishing for reasons that we could not understand. We were the losing, not the lost, generation.
—"Imagine Kissing Pete," pp.108-109

I see in these tales something of a working-class John Updike—both authors wrote vividly about petty squabbles and sordid adulteries, though O'Hara seldom strayed into academic settings. In fact, it turns out that Updike was "a fan of O'Hara's writing."

O'Hara himself drew other literary connections:"It's a library book, Miss Williams recommended it. Called Winesburg, Ohio, by a Sherwood Anderson. Sherwood Anderson. It's not for young people like you. It's for the old, like me. Full of plain, unpleasant truths. Very gloomy little stories that could have happened right here in Gibbsville. And did, some of them. Don't read it."
—"A Case History," p.176
*

I'm just going to leave this keen observation here for you:There is one law for the rich, and another law for the richer.
—"Pat Collins," p.349
*

As I inch closer to my thousandth book review on Goodreads (this one is #963, but who's counting?), this remonstrance struck home:"A thousand books. My Lord and Savior, that's a terrible, terrible thing, John. A terrible thing."
—Sarah Lundy to John Wesley Evans, in "Afternoon Waltz," p.587Perhaps someone even said this to O'Hara in real life.

*

About two-thirds of my way through Gibbsville, PA, I found myself thinking of an old song with similarly observant lyrics:Laughing on the bus,
Playing games with the faces.
She said the man in the gabardine suit
Was a spy.

I said, "Be careful,
His bow tie is really a camera..."

"Toss me a cigarette—
I think there's one in my raincoat."
"We smoked the last one
An hour ago."

So I looked at the scenery;
She read her magazine,
And the moon rose over an open field.
—from "America," by Simon & Garfunkel

*

O'Hara explores Gibbsville's sexual undercurrents more freely in Gibbsville, PA's later stories. After more than twenty pages, for example, "The General" takes a wholly unexpected turn. And the concluding stories, "A Man to be Trusted" and "Tuesday's as Good as Any," while not explicit on a word-by-word level (O'Hara was never one to revel in the shock of profane language), are both primarily about sex.

But not entirely, of course. I chuckled at O'Hara's "ten-two-and-four customers," at the start of "Tuesday's as Good as Any" (p.857)—although for some reason they're ordering Coke instead of Dr. Pepper in Dewey's respectable poolroom.

*

Gibbsville, PA doesn't exactly end so much as it just leaves off... much like this review, I'm afraid. By the end, though, you'll know more about Gibbsville and its inhabitants than most people ever learn about their own neighbors...