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.
Like you, Jeff, I'd never read a John O'Hara novel, just a few of his short stories, had seen Appointment in Samarra listed as perhaps his best book, and then your enthusiastic review made me want to read it at last. Cincinnati's public library had only two hard copies of the novel, and only one of them circulated, so I dutifully put a hold on it early this year. It didn't come through before the pandemic shut down the library for several months, but I finally got my mitts on it this summer.
ReplyDeleteVery glad I did, as I really liked the book, even more than I thought I might from your review. I'll second everything you say there, and add that I still can't quite believe it was put out by a major American publisher in 1934, as it seems very far ahead of its time, especially in its frank portraits of marital sexuality and of the intricacies of relationships between men and women in general. And I can echo Fran Lebowitz's comment that O'Hara was "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald" -- both apprentice writers had experienced traumatic interruptions in their family's wealth early on, but Fitzgerald made it through Princeton anyway, while O'Hara, if he couldn't attend his first choice Yale, seems to have skipped higher education altogether. I'm not saying that this experience put O'Hara in the same league of '30s leftist writers like Farrell and Steinbeck, but in this novel he acknowledges the existence of the working class (especially in a detailed discussion of the coal industry and its union labor in Eastern Pennsylvania) in a way I don't recall Fitzgerald ever getting to.
And if you'll permit me to indulge a personal fetish, I got a kick out of O'Hara listing sixteen (!) different makes of automobiles by their real-life names in this novel. With principal character Julian English a Cadillac dealer himself, I guess that opened the garage door for all these other manufacturers. When I was a kid in the Fifties, I was always irritated when a cop show or book would describe the suspect's vehicle as simply "a black sedan," which of course gave no precisely useful identifying information at all. There was a reluctance in those days by producers et.al. to mention brand names, for fear of them being taken as unpaid advertising, which was admirable in itself, but for a kid like me, it was basically a lie not to call a Ford a Ford. So O'Hara was well ahead of his time in that regard too. Thanks for steering me (so to speak) to Appointment in Samarra, Jeff.
-- Richard Riegel
Thanks Richard, great stuff. I don't know from car models myself, but I know that gripe about lack of specificity with commercial products on TV shows. Unfortunately, later, going the other way led to product placement!
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