Appointment in Samarra

by John O'Hara

Start Free Trial

Critical Evaluation

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

John O’Hara is supreme in the art and craft of the short story. Perhaps because of his newspaper background, he is able to condense a tale to its fundamentals and produce tightly crafted and powerful short fiction. With his ear for speech and eye for effect, he is in two or three sentences able to bring to life a character from nearly any walk of life. This gift also marks his novels, in particular perhaps his first novel, Appointment in Samarra.

One of O’Hara’s shortest and best-structured novels, Appointment in Samarra is the story of hubris in a modern setting. It takes place in 1930, after the crash of 1929 but before people understood just how bad the Depression would become. The hero of the novel, Julian English, has social status but destroys himself by not living up to it. Julian has two problems: people and alcohol, and both are revealed to be part of the inner problems that ultimately ruin him. There is much discussion in the book of who “belongs” and who does not, which clubs count in Gibbsville, what preparatory schools and colleges matter, and where one should be seen or not be seen. The laborer, mobster, and society man all think constantly about their position on the social ladder. Julian thinks about it too much.

The novel presents an accurate picture of a broad cross section of Gibbsville society. Observing different kinds of people, from the secretary in the automobile agency and the ex-convict working for the gangland boss to the society matron, O’Hara achieves a new kind of fictional reporting, in the best sense of the term. The humor and fast pace of the novel and the clean, sure style give it a surface slickness that is almost misleading, for it is not a superficial novel. There is depth behind the meretricious glitter and hard-boiled sensual flavor. The book’s racy language and sexual candor continue the pathbreaking trend begun only a short time earlier by Ernest Hemingway. The characters are concerned with superficialities, but that does not make them superficial. O’Hara is able to capture, especially in his dialogue, the nuances of tone that reveal the hidden depths.

Julian English, the central figure of the novel, is the most complex and interesting of the characters. He seems to burn with a compulsion toward self-destruction, yet however drunk he gets, part of his mind warns him when he is about to do something dangerous. Like many intelligent people, he observes himself as he moves through life. Yet, he recklessly plunges ahead, throwing the drink in Harry Reilly’s face, dancing and going out to the car with Helene Holman at the roadhouse, getting deliberately drunk so that he will not care what happens. By the time he quarrels with Froggy Ogden at the club and fights with the lawyers in the dining room, he has given up hope and is as contemptuous of himself as he is of them. Rational action has ceased to have any meaning for him. Julian is a direct forerunner of the existential heroes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus a decade later, who were influenced by O’Hara and Hemingway and other writers of the American “hard-boiled” school of writing, and he toys with his fate with an almost objective curiosity. “If I do this,” he seems to think, “will I get away with it?” Of course, he knows somewhere deep inside that he will not, that nobody ever gets away with anything. He is filled with “tremendous excitement” when he realizes that “he is in for it.” Perhaps, as he contemplates...

(This entire section contains 942 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

his “unknown, well-deserved punishment,” he is even slightly masochistic in his longing for pain and destruction.

Julian’s fatalism, and the fatalism that permeates the novel (and gives it its title), seem to be influenced in part by the novels and stories of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, O’Hara, while lacking the poetic vision and poetic style of Fitzgerald, avoids the hard-boiled prose of Hemingway and adds a poignant ruthlessness of his own. With economy and artistry, O’Hara draws the painful and engrossing portrait of a complex, fascinating, and doomed individual.

An inevitable progression, gaining in momentum like a ball rolling down a steep hill, takes over Julian’s fate. It will take a miracle to halt the inevitable doom that awaits him at the end, and as Julian knows, miracles do not happen for people like him. His death is early foreshadowed by the suicide of his grandfather. His own father frequently expresses fears that Julian’s character is as weak as that of his grandfather, and Julian comes to believe that he has a defective character and is doomed by it. This belief numbs him and renders him helpless before the onrush of events.

Appointment in Samarra rises above O’Hara’s other long works of fiction because it makes more of an attempt to deal with ideas and values. Often, the author’s technique of recording action with the detachment of a photographer fails to establish a moral frame of reference; the reader does not know what the author’s attitude toward the characters and events is. In this work, however, the character of Julian is portrayed in compelling vitality. Also adding to the immediacy is O’Hara’s custom of surrounding his dramatic action with historical exposition and long descriptions of the period: of its fashions, its horses and clubs, its automobiles, and the other transitory items that date a moment in history. In Appointment in Samarra, the precise documentation of social strata contributes to the story’s realistic effect.

Next

Appointment in Samarra

Loading...