Out In The Jazz Age Night – John O’Hara’s Appointment At Samarra

Books in Brief

Appointment At Samarra, John O’Hara , Harcourt, Brace, 1934

John O’Hara is a novelist who has undeservedly faded from the top ranks of American writers. At one time he was, not without reason, compared most favorably with contemporaries like Dos Passos, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Well, some much for literary fashions and trends. Here, in his first novel, O’Hara explores the trials and tribulations of three eventful days in the lives of a conventionally rich young Pennsylvania (fictional Gibbsville, to be exact, a scene for more than one of his later novels) country club set couple, the Englishes, and the narrowness of their little world and the poverty of their horizons. O’Hara always had a good ear for describing the contradictions and the frustrations of the essential meaninglessness of life for these denizens of the small town ‘smart set’, a preview of the homogenization of business-oriented society that would burst out after World War II in the sagas of the men in the grey flannel suits. Julian English is their father or older brother. And his fate is not pretty. Moreover, there is the catch. As explained in an Arabian proverb in the front of the book- you cannot escape your fate, even if you, as Julian desperately did, take action to move away the consequences of it. Well, maybe. But read the book.