[O'Hara's work is] a fiction of social absurdity.

For O'Hara's fiction was deeply consistent with the man, as it must be: it is a materialistic fiction, built on the patent solidity of society, the weight of things, the detailed appurtenances of possession, the measure and symbolic value of goods. O'Hara, in correspondence with Fitzgerald, once noted that they were both parvenu authors, and it is of course to the parvenu that social substance is most substantial, class and rank most real….

O'Hara's novels and stories, found excessively frank in their time, postulate a coordinated, respectable and essentially monogamous society, held by code and habit and desire, and struggling within it an essentially adulterous humanity. His first novel starts in an unsatisfactory marital bed, and so, in a sense, does all life in the O'Hara universe. Caught between the two—substantial, virtuous society and practical sexuality and angst—is that recurrent O'Hara type, the respectable reprobate….

His work shares the dominant literary attitudes of his time; it is touched with that mixture of radicalism and nostalgia central to the mood of the early to mid-century American novel, and something of the self-made intellectuality also characteristic of the period. His temper was shorter than that of many of his peers, and his anti-intellectuality … more assertive, leading to stronger declarations that what he possessed was, well, ultimate craft: the gift of getting dialogue right, observation precise, structure under control. Even his sense of grievance was reasonably typical; there was arrogance and defiance as well as social aspiration that passed, as with Fitzgerald, deep into the tenor of his writing. Perhaps the most striking difference from the rest of his rather incestuous generation is in the rhythm of the career. O'Hara was the writer as worker, and the work intensified as time went on….

O'Hara's is not an unexamined realism…. [He] became increasingly concerned with speculation about technique, and particularly about his modes of outward presentation of inward states; the result is a careful realism, in special and singular economy, one that O'Hara perfected long before he commented on it….

O'Hara at his best depended on tight lines of control. He never possessed technique in any Jamesian or experimental sense; his claim was to "craft" in a journalistically professional form.

But he could write with an extraordinary, clear purity, which is most articulate as a tone. It comes out as a mode of apparent indifference, a hard surface given to the text through a predominance of dialogue or a continuous functionality of scene, through the abstraction of psychological inwardness from the characters, through a particular way of spatializing the public and the private, the narrative overview and the inward moves of being. This offended critics who made humanism a requisite of a fictional text …, but of course compassion or involvement is not necessarily absent from the mode. We feel that O'Hara's characters are both given substance and drained of it by living in a world that is solid and harsh; we feel him creating to suppress, to limit what might be said in order to reveal this. The famous oblique endings of the stories work in this way….

O'Hara worked best with a very special marriage of accumulated, dense social detail, a given wealth of society, and a sparse and limited mode of writing; this is why he so frequently succeeds most in the short stories…. O'Hara's refusal to overdress, to go for metaphor in style, or for a total logic in narrative, and his insistence on distilling a precision from a story, are the essential notes [in his best stories]. The social surface is solid; the narrative presses continuously with a deducible logic; the anxieties underlying the experience are elicited; the text stays cool. Reality is both there and not there, as in all good realism; and if we want to judge that realism still has a stylistic currency, that there is an appropriate balance still to be won from this form of anxious social reconciliation, then we do well to look hard at O'Hara.