led me to the story (I’ll have more to say about those comments below).
O’Hara does not have space for any Higgins-like arias, and his dialogue calls
far less attention to itself than Higgins’s. Nevertheless, he is equally interested
in developing the interplay between conversational disclosures, authorial dis-
closures, and authorial disclosures across conversations. Examining O’Hara’s
character-character dialogue will expand our understanding of how skillful
authors can use this resource.
“Appearances” consists of three conversations among the members of the
Ambrie family—husband, Howard; wife, Lois; and their divorced daughter,
Amy—with each conversation involving only two of the characters: first How-
ard-Lois, then Howard-Amy, and finally, Lois-Amy. These conversations all
occur one Friday night in the fall of 1961 (John F. Kennedy is in the White
House and the book is published in 1962), though they refer to backstory
involving the early years of Howard and Lois’s marriage. O’Hara’s arrangement
of the sequence demonstrates how he adapts the typical pattern of character-
audience relationships: while Howard and Lois know much more than the
audience at the beginning of the first conversation, the audience knows much
more than all three characters by the end of the third. In other words, while
each character is simply participating in two conversations that take place
on that Friday night, O’Hara indirectly constructs and his audience actively
reconstructs a narrative that extends over a much longer time frame and cul-
minates in the events of these three conversations. Furthermore, O’Hara’s dis-
closures give intriguing nuance to the pattern: Lois and Amy share knowledge
about the past that Howard does not have (or that they believe he does not
have, a qualification I will return to), and then Lois refuses to share other
knowledge when Amy asks her a leading question about the past. Thus, it
seems that Lois knows the most, Amy the next most, and Howard, the char-
acter whom O’Hara begins with, the least. But the story is not called “Appear-
ances” for nothing, because, as we shall see, it also gives the audience reason
to question this apparent hierarchy. Both the questions and the more secure
knowledge greatly influence our understanding of each character and of the
Ambrie family as a whole.
“Appearances” begins with a brief passage of exposition that efficiently
accomplishes several purposes: (1) it establishes Howard as the character
whose experiences we initially track; (2) it locates the action on a clear, warm
night; and (3) it identifies the Ambries as a well-to-do couple (they live in a
house with a “porte-cochere”) with an apparently careless daughter (she leaves
the door of her MG open and the light on in the garage). In the first conversa-
tion, we continue tracking Howard and begin to track Lois, as the two of them
discuss his plan to play golf in the morning rather than go to the funeral of
186 • CHAPTER 9