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| Appointment in Samarra: A Novel | 
| Author: John O'hara
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $4.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 113131
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0375719202
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780375719202
ASIN: 0375719202
Publication Date: July 8, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand spankin' new. Perfect. I am not a huge bookseller, just an individual. I price as cheaply as I can, I pay regular postage, not bulk rate and the full Amazon commision not a reduced rate. This is as cheap as I can go. I will ship out immediately from Chicago.
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Product Description
A twentieth-century classic, Appointment in Samarra is the first and most widely read book by the writer Fran Leibowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances, where the music plays late into the night and the liquor flows freely. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English—the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction. Appointment in Samarra brilliantly captures the personal politics and easy bitterness of small-town life. It is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement, and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American novelist.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 OK July 10, 2008
This is the story of middle and upper class society in a Pennsylvania town in the early part of the Depression. It is also the time of Prohibition. The novel focuses on the rapid self-destruction of a single man and how this process affects those around him.
I found this book mildly interesting if only for the depiction of this exclusive group of people, but I found the dialogue stilted and the events that occur unrealistic.
Social Self-Destruction April 24, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This story examines the lives of the social elite in a small town in 1930. The characters are trapped in rigid spots, expected to mix with certain people and display certain behaviors. Within this social elite, childhoods and adolescences are woven into a snarled web of relationships.
Julian English's life should be perfectly happy. He is successful financially as well as socially, has a crowd of friends, is invited to all of the best parties, and has the perfect wife. In reality, though, he is self-conscious about his relationships and filled with a simmering anger at many of those around him.
Fueled with a bit too much alcohol at a holiday party, Julian finally snaps, throwing a drink into the face of a man who annoys him with long-winded stories and too much affection toward Julian's wife. In one moment of impulsivity, Julian makes an enemy of a powerful man, and Julian's life, as a result, rapidly begins to unravel.
This story was full of very believable characters, whose actions and emotions jumped off of the pages. It was easy to understand how Julian's problems could have seemed so insurmountable to him, and it was painful to read the different ways in which he kept making his own situation worse. I liked being able to see what brought each of the separate characters to this place and time, and how things could have gone differently if they had made different choices in their youth.
The only drawback for me was that I was sometimes lost in the relationships among characters as adults, especially those who were not a main focus of the book, and I found myself skimming over lengthy descriptions that didn't seem to feed into the main plot of the story.
 Minimalist Style and "To-the-Point" Narrative [22][T] April 13, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Trained in the low couture of daily print journalism, John O'Hara's minimalist style makes this novel about Pennsylvania's anthracite community seem most American, most blue collar, most "down to earth."
Reminiscent of a Fitzgerald protagonist, Julian English's engagements in destructive lifestyle habits make him lose reputation, prestige and his friends in the small city of Gibbsville - population approximately 30,000. And, like Fitzgerald - the cause of the demise is alcohol.
Although not as eerily descriptive of the dipsomaniacal psyche as Lowry's protagonist (the Consul) in "Under the Volcano", this book resonates with the torturous conflict running through the depressed mind of the young man who - at least what others would proclaim - "has it all." He has a good job, money, good family, and most importantly for those in the 1930's - a solid and beautiful "swell gal" for a wife.
When I read this novel, it became more and more obvious to me that the John Updike introduction was more than a mere coincidence. Julian very much resembles Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom of "Rabbit Run." Gibbsville is so similar to Updike's Brewer. Harry is 26, Julian is 29 going on 30. Updike was 29 when he wrote "Rabbit , Run." O'Hara about the same. Julian and Harry are married to women from good families. Both are frustrated. Both are crushed by the demands placed upon their immature souls - the demands by both family and community.
After having read a few older classics which drip prose through syrupy words reminiscent of 19th century style, this Hemingway-influenced writer whose light usage of English vocabulary and "minimalist fiction" makes reading whip at a much faster pace - something which this 21st century reader finds more appealing. I find his writing style more akin to the 20th century American mystery writer - Marlowe, Chandler and Cain.
My one recommendation to anyone reading this or "Rabbit, Run" is to read the books back to back. The similarities are astounding, but how each twists and turns in opposite directions seems to be reflective of different sentimentalities and national spirits: "Rabbit, Run" (1960) involves a more optimistic America than the post-Depression America of "Appointment in Samarra" (1934).
A Minor Masterpiece March 31, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
O'Hara is a forgotten writer, in part because of his singular ability to alienate his peers. I read this because I had never read anything by him and because my father recommended O'Hara as one of the great short story writers of the century. This work, of course, is a novel, albeit a short one, and was O'Hara's first full length work. He was only 28 when he wrote it and finished it during the depths of the Great Depression.
The book is extraordinary for its stylistic excellence. O'Hara's writing is taut like Hemingway, but with a better eye for all the nuances of class, ethnicity, and small town society. He has the uncanny ability to tell a story and to create believable and even compelling characters with a few brush strokes. An example of O'Hara's brilliance in story-telling is how he relates the key incident of the book: where the hero, Julian English, starts his downward spiral by throwing a drink in the face of his financial benefactor for being too "Irish". English visualizes the gesture and decides he'll never go through with it. Later on, we find out from witnesses relating the incident that he went ahead with it anyway. Nothing better captures the mysteries and ambiguities of human behavior than this elliptical narrative technique -- who is to say why we act on some impulses and not on others?
What O'Hara is able to demonstrate better than anyone since Dreiser is the precarious nature of social status and the precipitous fall that is closer than we'd like to think. English's fall is fast, but not so shocking when we consider how precarious his status was in the first place.
On one level, O'Hara seems to admire English as a man's man and the reader too can't help but admire him. And what's quite creepy is the sense that O'Hara seems to share some of English's anti-semitism and other prejudices. But on another level, O'Hara portrays the upper class pretentions of English as corrupt, and O'Hara seems to convey the sense that American society would be improved by English's underling's ascension to English's management of the company. American society would be improved by more fluidity and by more merit-based methods to selecting society's leaders.
O'Hara's portrayal of male-female relationships and sexuality is compelling and perhaps a bit racy for its time. His view of female sexuality tends to stress its submissive strains, which seems to rather too conveniently fit traditional male chauvinism. But on balance, his willingness to allow female characters strong sexual drives was an enlightened attitude for the time.
What's missing from the novel is a convincing explanation of why English suffers from the self-destructive impulse. How that impulse destroys him is convincingly told, but the why tends to be missing. Also missing is a positive vision for an alternative to Julian English. The novel opens and closes with sketch of English's subordinate, Fiegler. One gets the sense that Fiegler is the good middle class foil for English, but the character is not sufficiently developed to make the point.
All of which points to perhaps another reason why O'Hara is a forgotten writer: his most noted book is limited in scope and does not struggle with the great issues of human nature and society. He writes a masterpiece but a minor masterpiece.
An extremely honest work. July 26, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
O'Hara introduces his main character and drives straight and hard to the story's conclusion. He writes peceptively about marital relations, and about how men and women think about sexual acts. I was really surprised at how directly and perceptively he writes about sex.
He is in complete control of this work from beginning to end, and it never for a moment sounds false or romantisized.
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