Title: Appointment in Samarra
First published: 1934
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.
Subjects: Ethnic relations, Fiction, Fiction in English, Marriage, Married people, Self-destructive behavior, Social life and customs, Suicide victims, Young men, Fiction, general, Large type books, American literature, Pennsylvania, fiction, Married people, fiction, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Gibbsville (pa. : imaginary place), fiction, Domestic fiction
Places: Pennsylvania