On the back of my 1963 Bantam paperback of John O'Hara's The Big Laugh, a blurb calls him "America's most powerful novelist." Hemingway and Faulkner were dead, Dos Passos had moved on to other forms, and the generation of Mailer, Updike and others hadn't yet moved up to take their place. That leaves O'Hara, who was dismissed by many critics but whose books always sold well. The Big Laugh is a Hollywood novel with the O'Hara earmarks: long passages of pitch-perfect dialogue, a preoccupation with status and its markers, and crumbling relationships. O'Hara is nothing if not powerful, but who could hold that title today, in a landscape full of pipsqueaks like Jonathan Franzen?
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