description: 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.
language: English
title: Appointment in Samarra
titlecomplete: Appointment in Samarra
characters: Froggy Ogden, Caroline English, Harry Reilly, Julian English
genres: 20th Century, American, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Classics, The United States Of America, Fiction, Modern Classics
ratings_count: 15156
places: Mississippi
publisher: Random House Value Publishing