Cheap Appointment in Samarra: A Novel (Book) (John O'Hara) Price

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Customer Reviews of Appointment in Samarra: A Novel

An extremely honest work.
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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Fear in a handful of dust
John O'Hara's first novel detailing the lives of the wealthy and the sordid among the smart set of Gibbsville (a thinly disguised Pottsville, PA) made a sensation when it came out in the early years of the Depression, and, reading it now, it's very easy to see why. Although O'Hara writes about the same sorts of characters here that his contemporary Fitzgerald detailed, he avoids for the most part Fitzgerald's chivalric sentimentalism. As in his later BUTTERFIELD 8, one character among O'Hara's assortment of the well-to-do makes a terrible dramatic gesture that sets off a chain of events that ultimately results in that character's doom, thus demonstrating the tremendous power of this social world (held together by its nasty array of prejudices, snobberies, and cruelties). Few writers could capture the rhythms of early 20th-century conversation so well as O'Hara did, and the give-and-takes between husband and wife, master and servant, mother and daughter are a real pleasure to read.

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THE VOICE OF THE 'SMART SET'
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, so much for literary fashions. Here, in his first novel, O'Hara explores the trials and tribulations of three eventful days in the lives of a conventionally rich young Philadephais Main Line(fictional Gibbsville, to be exact, a scene for more than one of his later novels) country club set couple, Julian and Caroline English, 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 and their families. Julian English is their father or older brother. And his fate is not pretty. Moreover, there is the catch. As expressed in an Arabian parable in the front of the book- you cannot escape your fate, even if you, as Julian desperately did, take action to move away the horror of it. Well, maybe. But read the book.