Profound, But Not PC : GIBBSVILLE, PA., <i> By John O’Hara</i> / <i> Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli</i> / <i> Preface by George V. Higgins (Carroll & Graf: $26.95; 864 pp.)</i>

One of the maladies of the 1990s is that we seem to suffer cultural amnesia--an inability to remember what we found valuable even a few years ago. The publication of this collection of all 56 of John O’Hara’s superb stories and novellas set in Gibbsville, Pa., reminds us of this deficiency, which we excuse by pointing to the avalanche of intellectual and entertainment material that floods us.

Amid the din, it has been too easy to forget about O’Hara. Although he won his share of prizes and sold well enough to keep most of his books in print over a 36-year career, as he grew older he was deemed politically incorrect even before PC became the primary requirement for being fashionably intellectual. He had started out being criticized from the cultural right for emphasizing sexuality as an elemental life force, then by the literary left for focusing on money and status.

Both assessments of him were factually correct, but they ought to be regarded as high praise rather than criticism. O’Hara understood and described the way people really live--no small accomplishment. That we are driven by finances and sexuality should come as no surprise to anyone who reads either a newspaper’s business pages or columnists like Dear Abby.

Much has been made of the fact that O’Hara, who was born and raised in Pottsville, Pa., 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia in the coal mining regions of the Allegheny Mountains, created in his Gibbsville stories a fictional replica of Pottsville as it existed between 1890 and 1950. The editor of this book, Matthew Bruccoli, points out in his introduction that O’Hara joined Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg/Clyde, Ohio), Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha/Lafayette County, Miss.) and Thomas Wolfe (Altamont/Asheville, N.C.) in inventing what Bruccoli calls a “locale a clef.” “All great fiction writers,” Bruccoli says, “are great social historians.”

It is not so much that O’Hara had an eye for the telling aspect--he certainly did, so that when someone drives a Locomobile rather than a Marmon, you understand what those cars mean in terms of status (even if you barely know the difference between a Toyota and a Nissan)--but the details that enthrall define the time in which the stories are set. A man running a speak-easy, who sells beer only as a reluctant accommodation to customers who demand it instead of whiskey, says: “What they do at the breweries, they make good beer, then they take the alcohol out of it to stay out of trouble with the law. Then they get word that it’s OK to make a shipment, and they quick needle it with ether. So a man comes in my place and drinks 10 or 15 beers and he’s putting away a lot of ether. Bad for the disposition. They get sleepy and they try to stay awake and all they get is disagreeable.”

What elevates O’Hara from being merely the provider of good journalistic facts to the stature of profound talent is not only his fascinating mastery of historical minutiae, but his clear, almost calm way of illuminating emotional truths. “When you have grown up with someone it is much easier to fill in gaps of five years, 10 years, in which you do not see him, than to supply those early years in the life of a friend you meet in maturity. . . . With the friends of later life you may exchange boyhood stories that seem worth telling, but boyhood is not all stories. It is mostly not stories, but day-to-day, unepisodic living. And most of us are too polite to burden our later-life friends with unexciting anecdotes about people they will never meet. (Likewise we hope they will not burden us.)”

Or there is the widower talking to his brother as they both move beyond middle age: “I couldn’t possibly change my body. But what if I could? To restore my youthful vigor? And then what? Find myself at 60, chasing after young women? Beating young men at tennis? What the hell for? Young women aren’t very interesting in bed, and I’d done about as well at tennis as I ever cared to.” (One can only imagine O’Hara’s amusement had he lived long enough to see today’s plastic surgery ads.)

There are a couple of added attractions to this book, as if any are needed. Besides Bruccoli’s informative and insightful introduction, there is a preface by novelist George V. Higgins that eloquently praises O’Hara and also gives the back of Higgins’ adept hand to writers who don’t produce, a failure O’Hara could never be accused of.

Higgins and Bruccoli are, of course, merely a bonus: “Gibbsville, Pa.” is one of the most important collections of American fiction to be published in years. Keeping in mind that a book of this bulk might make some would-be purchasers nervous, the longest story is 51 pages, which means that even the most over-extended reader can pace him- or herself through weeks of reading without worrying about losing track of either plot or characters.

If, like me, you grew up reading O’Hara when he was being published in the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post in the 1950s and ‘60s, this book is indispensable. If you are unlucky enough never to have read O’Hara, “Gibbsville, Pa.” is the remedy for an ailment--cultural deprivation--the nature of which you will understand when you’ve finished this remarkable literary feast.