Books › Appointment in Samarra
Appointment in Samarra
First published 1934 · 692 pages
A razor-sharp, alcohol-fueled chronicle of a man's spectacular, self-inflicted ruin over a single holiday weekend.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like watching a slow-motion car crash at a country club. It is a ruthlessly observant, alcohol-soaked plunge into the rigid social hierarchies of 1930s America, driven by a propulsive, ticking-clock momentum. The atmosphere is thick with cigar smoke, gin, and an inescapable sense of doom as the protagonist systematically dismantles his own life over a mere seventy-two hours. The prose is crisp, unsentimental, and devastatingly precise, capturing the exact cadence of how people speak when they are lying to themselves and each other. It is a claustrophobic, deeply cynical masterpiece that will captivate readers who love the sharp-edged domestic tragedies of Richard Yates or the doomed, glittering disillusionment of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- fatalistic
- alcohol-soaked
- tense
- Tone
- cynical
- unsentimental
- observant
- sharp
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- self-destruction · social stratification · fragility of reputation · inescapable fate · hollowness of privilege
- The writing
- Crisp, journalistic, and ruthlessly precise in its detailing of social class and dialogue.
- The arc
- A rapid, agonizing descent from comfortable privilege to total, self-inflicted ruin.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate sharp-edged social realism and unsentimental character studies of deeply flawed, self-sabotaging protagonists.
Content notes
- suicide
- alcoholism
- infidelity
- period-typical bigotry
About the book
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor, and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner, the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the low-lifes. In O’Hara, they could be happening to you.
Description from Open Library.
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