Sermons and Soda Water

The three linked stories related in Sermons and Soda-water show the brilliance of John O’Hara’s gifts as a writer of the works of a hundred pages or so gifts which in recent years have tended to be over-shadowed by his stature as a writer of novels on the largest plan.
The Girl on the Baggage Truck, Imagine Kissing Pete, and We’re Friends Again admirably fulfil their author’s intention which is ‘to record the way people talked and felt’ during the troubled interim from the end of one world war to the end of another ‘and to do it with complete honesty and variety’.
Variety is indeed the spice of life he imaginatively and succinctly records In New York, Pennsylvania and Hollywood. In speak-easies, country clubs, grand hotels and war factories; and in the homes of many sorts and conditions of men and women. In short, the essence of a world that he knows and understands and can interpret with wisdom born of long experience in its ways.