Volume 14, Number 12 · June 18, 1970
Language Barriers
By Denis Donoghue
The Best and the Last of Edwin O'Connor
edited with an Introduction by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and with contributions by Edmund Wilson, by John V. Kelleher
Little, Brown, 465 pp., $10.00
Max Jamison
by Wilfrid Sheed
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 260 pp., $6.50
The Best and the Last of Edwin O'Connor is an act of homage. O'Connor died in 1968 at the age of fifty, his work a public success but still, in the artistic sense, incomplete, his possibilities unfulfilled. His last work includes some of his best, especially an unfinished story called 'The Boy.' The argument between Grandfather and P.J. about eternal verity, in that story, is better than anything I recall from the big novels. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Edmund Wilson, and John V. Kelleher speak warmly of the man, his gaiety, the radiance of his friendship, but they do not say much of his art. Perhaps they feel that in the choice between perfection of the life and perfection of the work O'Connor chose the better part. In any case they testify to a remarkable man. Their book contains selections from all the novels, The Oracle, The Last Hurrah, The Edge of Sadness, I Was Dancing, All in the Family, with fragments of later writing, including a story called 'Baldini' on which O'Connor collaborated with Mr. Wilson.
Review, 2319 words
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