Cars in this novel, where almost a dozen different brands are named, everything from a Stutz Bearcat to a Baker electric, are status symbols and emblems of progress but also trysting places, nests of refuge, and invitations to danger and recklessness.Īppointment is also authoritative about class and drinking-along with sex, O’Hara’s two other great themes.
O’Hara notices cars, and what they reveal about their owners, as carefully as does Irma Fliegler, who, lying in bed on that Christmas morning, can identify the cars out on the snowy street just from the sound each one makes driving by. He is well informed about sex, speakeasies and roadhouses, college fraternities and sororities, country clubs, coal mining, small-town journalism, big bands, the latest dance steps, Broadway shows, books, records, gangster slang, the right way to mix a high-ball, and cars-cars especially. What also makes Appointment seem like a young man’s book is the way it tries to pack in almost everything O’Hara knew about the world, which was quite a lot for a twenty-eight-year-old. After his brief tryst with the bootlegger’s girl, the book says: “Julian, lost in his coonskins, felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment.
There’s an impatient, impetuous side to Julian-who isn’t quite thirty, we have to remind ourselves, and enjoys his own ruin even as it’s happening.
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Julian’s various offenses, none of them terrible in themselves-throwing a drink at the country club bore Harry Reilly coming on to the girlfriend of the local bootlegger, Ed Charney getting into a fistfight with his friend Froggy Ogden, a one-armed World War I vet-swiftly become a torrent that feels both dizzying and inevitable. Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey (in which Death speaks of meeting a merchant in Samarra): an appointment in Samarra, we know from the beginning, is an appointment with death itself. Even on a second reading, when you know what’s going to happen, you tear through it still not quite believing in what’s just ahead and what’s already been established by the novel’s epigraph, taken from W. Set in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a lightly disguised version of Pottsville, where O’Hara grew up, the entire action of Appointment in Samarra-Julian English’s whirlwind of self-destruction-takes place in just thirty-six hours, and its breakneck pace is startling and exciting. O’Hara began it in December 1933, when he was just twenty-eight, and wrote it in something like white heat, finishing in a little under four months. The speed with which the book was written may account for the urgency of its storytelling. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was.”
Though unfaithful to her, Julian can’t stop loving Caroline, and after O’Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can’t help falling a little in love with her, too. Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Julian has been dispatched on a disagreeable errand, and Caroline rewards him by waiting in their bedroom in a black lace negligee she calls her “whoring gown.” About their lovemaking, the novel says, “she was as passionate and as curious, as experimental and joyful as ever he was.”īefore O’Hara, sex in American novels-polite novels, anyway-was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren’t known to enjoy it. Later in the book, another married couple-Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, and his wife, Caroline-make love in the middle of Christmas afternoon. Originally published in 1934, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple-Luther and Irma Fliegler-having sex and on Christmas morning, no less.
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