Appointment in Samarra (1934)

According to Wikipedia, a cranky John O'Hara late in life denied licensing rights to his stories for anthologies—especially literary collections intended to be taught in college—which may account for his relative obscurity since his death in 1970. Or, anyway, I barely knew him and only read this novel recently. I think I mixed him up with some other writer (for some reason I want to say John Hersey) and thought Appointment in Samarra was some kind of war novel. It is not. It is the kind of novel for which John Updike writes a warm introduction. O'Hara is the kind of writer Fran Lebowitz can call "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." And Fitzgerald (and Ernest Hemingway too) liked O'Hara or at least this novel real well. I like it a lot too. Not very much happens in it and yet it is almost perfectly mesmerizing. It is set among the country club claque of a small city in Pennsylvania in 1930. The Great Depression has arrived but not yet FDR, and it's still Prohibition. Julian English is the town Cadillac dealer and a drunk. On Christmas Eve he tosses a drink in the face of a man with powerful connections in the town, including its organized crime underworld. It's all in a day's work for the reckless English, who is cynical, embittered, and self-destructive. O'Hara has caught a unique moment in American history here, the widespread economic collapse as seen through the eyes of the wealthy and relatively unaffected. Organized crime is accepted by them as a way to do business. Most people seem to be relatively comfortable acquiring alcohol from the black market, for example. Perhaps the strongest point of the novel is O'Hara's candid and realistic treatment of sexuality in marriages, the natural connubial blisses as well as the philandering. Updike writes that "the Englishes have a heterosexual relationship beside which those in The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms are romantic and insubstantial." I also get some sense of Sherwood Anderson's writing in O'Hara—not just the focus on Midwestern-style grotesques, but the whole approach to writing as a process of corralling happy unconscious accidents. I suspect both O'Hara and Anderson may not have understood how they managed to create their best work. Appointment in Samarra was the first of O'Hara's 17 novels and 13 story collections (he also wrote nonfiction, plays, and screenplays) and it's widely considered his best, published before he was 30. The only one worth reading, according to some. I understood he has some reputation for short stories, a regular in The New Yorker for years, but this novel is the first and only thing by him I know. It is indeed a great and impressive novel, and should be read before anything by Hemingway (and never mind that Updike wrote a foreword and made some good points).

In case it's not at the library.