THE ART OF BURNING BRIDGES: A Life of John O’Hara. By Geoffrey Wolff. Knopf. 373 pp. $30

The epitaph on the gravestone of novelist John O’Hara was a postmortem provocation to his critics: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well." It didn’t help that the words were his own.

O’Hara (1905–70) was the son of a prominent Irish physician in the coal-wealthy town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (Gibbsville in his fiction). He was raised Catholic when Protestant was the socially preferable thing to be. A change in the family’s fortunes kept him from attending Yale, and he never got over the exclusion. And he was a sucker all his life for the presumed insignia of status—the right schools, the right clubs (and club ties), the right suits and shoes and cars.

Wonderfully attuned to the calibration of social codes in America, O’Hara holds the record for the number of short stories published in The New Yorker, and his books have sold millions of copies. But the bloated best sellers that made him rich in the 1950s and 1960s lost him the favor of critics, who insisted that his best work was either in his short stories or, worse, in his earliest novels, Appointment in Samarra (1934) and Butterfield 8 (1935). Though O’Hara loved money, he desperately needed the respect of his peers too. And sometimes he got it—as when, in 1964, he received the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor bestowed previously on Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway. But the prize he thought he deserved, the big one, always eluded him. When John Steinbeck won the Nobel in 1962, O’Hara telegraphed his congratulations and said that he could "think of only one other author I’d rather see get it."

The once-famous O’Hara has now fallen low. In part, that may be because manners no longer matter in America. When cellphones foul the air and flip-flops grace the workplace, and when any self, no matter how puny, qualifies as imperial, who can be anxious about the wrong tie? But O’Hara’s reputation may be down as well because the man gave his critics so much reason to do him in. He was an obnoxious drunk, an insecure snob, a boastful and insufferable son of a bitch. That some folks suffered him nonetheless, and were his friends, is the mystery Geoffrey Wolff sets out to solve in this new biography: "The specifics of why a cherished friend was cherished—I had the hubris to believe I could name." In the event, he doesn’t quite succeed in naming them, though he brings a novelist’s finesse and a wised-up adult’s jauntiness to the task. And unlike biographers who pretend to be omniscient, he is always ready to concede that we can’t know what really happened.

There have been several earlier biographies of O’Hara. Do we need another? Maybe, if it gets his name before the public again. But shake the facts of the life as dexterously as Wolff does, they still roll out snake eyes. To know the petty details of O’Hara’s behavior—such as that he wanted a friend to steal matchbooks from New York’s tony Racquet and Tennis Club so that he could leave them around his Princeton home for guests to see—is painful if you admire the fiction.

But if reading about O’Hara is a chore, reading O’Hara can be addictive. Though a fan, Wolff is insufficiently persuasive about the merits of the fiction. In four decades of novels and short stories, O’Hara created, mostly out of the doings of the Pennsylvania gentry in and around Pottsville, an entire fictional universe, immediately recognizable as his, where the painstakingly recounted personal and institutional histories seem to bleed together into a single vast chronicle of decline and disappointment. Yes, the multigenerational novels lumber from moment to moment, and always have years to go, but you keep turning the pages. And dozens of the short stories are flatout, dead-on perfect (see Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara, with an introduction by novelist Louis Begley, published earlier this year). If O’Hara didn’t tell the truth about his time, at least he told truths, and better than most of the competition.

—James M. Morris