GOOD SAMARITAN AND OTHER STORIES

Not just the drabs and dribs of the 1972 posthumous collection, The Time Element, with some stories that are stronger along with occasional ones which are flat and have been overtaken by time. O'Hara — you know him well — from Gibbsville to Hollywood to Ohio, from country clubs to poolrooms, from men of property to some of lesser circumstance like unremarkable "George Munson," from fathers to incommunicado sons ("I'm sorry, son, but I guess we didn't have much to go on. Golf isn't enough") or the husband with a wife to whom he addresses an annual "Christmas Poem" — in other words the all kinds O'Hara wrote. Among the best, "Sound View" and the title story (more recent — 1968) about the man who cracked up after having given up trying. . . Always there is the remarkable facility, the class cachet ("If there are family reasons for going to Pomfret you'll have to make allowances") and the mimetic accuracy with which he transfixed certain people in certain places at certain times.