"Appointment in Samarra," by John O’Hara

We're wrapping up our 2024 with a 1934 perpetual bestseller! Pennsylvania, Christmastime, and a resonating observation of American life, all wrapped up in one. After traveling down through the decades to us, does this slimmer novel hold gravitas with our group today?

May the conversation ensue around a table filled with good friends, good food, and good drink! Happy Holidays, everybody!

From Goodreads:

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement.

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.

Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O’Hara’s iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream—and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American writer.