The Big Laugh [Paperback]

John O'Hara wrote in several geographies: Gibbsville, PA; Manhattan, NY; and Hollywood. The Big Laugh is one of his Hollywood novels. In his entire body of work (and it is prodigious), I would put this in the bottom 25%. It begins with a nobody forging a career in hollywood by blackmailing the first person to give him an acting job. A weak premise not usually found in O'Hara's plots. It ends with a twist -- hence the Big Laugh. This is the type of novel that is only enjoyed by someone who is a diehard fan of the author. The plotting is weak; it's missing the dialogue and little details that are a hallmark of O'Hara's outstanding work.

This book started off really well. The first part with Hubert Ward conniving the people around him to make ends meet and his growing stardom in the theatre were all electrifying--O'Hara at his very best--but it all goes downhill after that. First of all, O'Hara writes in exposition in the beginning and in the epilogue that Ward was a heel, but I never got that impression throughout the narrative, and Ward even came off as rather honest, blunt, and down-to-earth. Second of all, his marriage to Nina Stephens was absolutely unbelievable; and I think O'Hara may have been reading a little too much Hemingway; some of the dialog between Ward and Nina were starkly reminiscent of several early Hemingway novels. And there were even two suicides, AGAIN recalling Gatsby. Overall, "The Big Laugh" is substandard O'Hara, but a pleasurable quick read utterly without pretension and profundity. As usual, O'Hara wrote brilliantly and never wrought a boring line of prose, and he was a speed reader's dream come true.

The Big Laugh was originally pubished about 1962 and was a bestseller at that time. In the first few pages, the author says that it is about a man who was trying to be someone he was not. He was a rascal to begin with, tried to redeem himself and succeeded to some extent for awhile but then failed in the end.
Hubert Ward was kicked out by his family, cheated a friend out of rent money, killed a woman in a hit and run incident, and when he got desperate enough, he blackmailed a producer for a bit part in a play. From there he went to Hollywood where he became a huge star, participating in the glamor life, though he drank very little, did not gamble, and generally restrained himself from fooling around with married women, who often tried to seduce him. He fell madly in love with and married a young society woman who eventually got tired of him and began seeing a writer on the side. So he decided to have an affair of his own and made a bad choice -- he selected the girl friend of the producer he had first blackmailed in the beginning of his career. The producer found out about it and killed his girlfriend and himself.
I failed to see how the stated premise was played out. I found the dialogue to be weak and improbable, but the pages of unparagraphed narrative were strangely entertaining. I suspect that the bit that made this book a bestseller was the overt sex, both homo- and hetero-, which was not common in the mainstream in the early 60's. I suspect people found it titilating at the time; it's tame by today's standards. However, there is something more and I'm not sure what it is, unless it's the true story of the author's own personal life, at least part of it. While it is certainly not a "page-turner," it is interesting in some way, even though I personally have no interest in the lives of the Hollywood rich and famous.