John O'Hara (1)Recensioni

I read this a few months ago and the characters of Grace Caldwell and Sidney Tate remain vivid. Grace can come across as a sex maniac but she is not one-dimensional. Her husband Sidney seems to have everything in the world but he is actually a lonely man. The moment that Grace realised this when she saw him polishing his shoes, is to me a milestone scene, and one that is unforgettable.

I really despised the main character of this novel. I was glad he had an appointment in Samarra.½

My goal was to read an older book alternating with a hot, new title. This served well as I had never read O'Hara which would now be considered historical fiction, it takes place in the Thirties, Forties, Fifties in Pennsylvania. The story also tied in with the movie we watched last night, The Swimmer, from the John Cheever tale about a man whose exalted social position collapses with the loss of his job. [b:Sermons and soda water|50613537|Sermons and soda water|John O'Hara|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579591273l/50613537._SX50_.jpg|75611823] follows the lives of Ivy Leaguers from a small town, Gibbsville, who fall on hard times in their financial and marital fortunes. O'Hara uses lots of dialogue introduce his characters. Class and status are important yet the key couple, Bobbie and Pete, disregard it: Bobbie has an affair with the bootlegger and frequents the Dan Patch Tavern while Pete works at the aluminum plant and sleeps with a typist. Flagons of drink are consumed, in fact, the bootlegger accuses Bobbie of being a lush ending their tryst. People get sore, not angry; bawl not cry; get the bounce instead of being fired or laid off. A slice of Americana, well written by an significant author whom my mom forbid teenage me to read ([b:Ten North Frederick|796907|Ten North Frederick|John O'Hara|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440620321l/796907._SY75_.jpg|1092644][b:BUtterfield 8|49715|BUtterfield 8|John O'Hara|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320445243l/49715._SY75_.jpg|1768442][b:Appointment in Samarra/Butterfield 8/Hope of Heaven|4589146|Appointment in Samarra/Butterfield 8/Hope of Heaven|John O'Hara|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1314241794l/4589146._SX50_.jpg|4638581] all classics.

Most people will be familiar with the parable that the title alludes to, in which a man, encountering death in a Baghdad bazaar, immediately flees to the distant city of Samarra in hopes of alluding his fate ... only to find death waiting for him there, explaining: "I, too, was surprised to encounter you at the market, as our appointment was always in Samarra." The idea being that there's no escaping fate once it has you in its sites.

This is certainly the plight of Julian English, the protagonist of this tale of upper middle class WASPS in 1930s Gibbsville, Illinois. Julian's the owner of a prosperous Cadillac dealership, husband to a wife who genuinely loves him (in her whiny 1930s way), with a social life that revolves around the local country club and its WASPy members. But in the course of an eventful two days, fate relentlessly hunts our golden boy down, the result of a combination of misbehaviour, mischance, misapprehension, and not an insignificant measure of hubristic overreach, as Julian (along with many other characters in this novel) consistently reaches for more than he needs or wants.

O'Hara's claim to fame is that he was, at one time, the most prolific contributor of tales to the New Yorker magazine, and boy does this read like something Woody Allen would pen. It's well written and crafted, but the incessant whininess of the characters can get a little fatiguing. With the exception of a subplot involving a low-level hood named Al Grecco, everyone here is dealing with WASP-y first-world problems: attending the "right" college, driving the "right" car, marrying the "right" spouse, living in the "right" neighborhood, attending the "right" social events and parties, drinking, gossiping, and judging each other relentlessly. The crimes that destroy Julius aren't crimes in the legal sense, but crimes against the norms of his class: throwing a drink into the face of a social peer, drinking too much, humiliating his wife.

Almost 100yrs later, some aspects of this tale - the country club dances & raccoon coats, the male-centric marriages, the insane drinking - may feel like a time capsule. Alas, however, the central themes of this tale - social gamesmanship and snobbery, hypocrisy, hubris & self-emoliation - are timeless.

A sort of inverted The Scarlet Letter peopled by dreary snobs, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra is a decent – though limited – idea let down by the author's indulgence and ennui; a long-winded joke that I was tired of long before the punchline.

Set in Christmas 1930 amongst the well-to-do WASPs of a Pennsylvania milieu, O'Hara's novel begins with an epigraph quoting W. Somerset Maugham's 'Appointment in Samarra' fable, about a man who flees to the town of Samarra after seeing the Grim Reaper in a Baghdad marketplace. When questioned on this, the Grim Reaper expresses bemusement, because he had not expected to see him in Baghdad: they had an appointment in Samarra. O'Hara's novel is pretty much a mechanism reiterating this tale, but whereas Maugham told it succinctly and evocatively in a single paragraph, O'Hara drags it out to novel length and to lesser effect.

In O'Hara's version, a slight, vain, upper-class wet named Julian English has a moment of pique at a dinner party, and throws his drink in the face of one of his peers, Harry Reilly. Julian then suffers the banal fallout of this act – amounting to some mild and ineffectual disapproval from his social circle – but, tying himself in knots over this nonsense and fearing retaliation from the well-connected Harry, Julian begins a downward spiral. Fulfilling the twist of the 'Appointment in Samarra' fable, there's a rewarding moment of bathos at the end as it turns out a bemused Harry has not been plotting any revenge at all, and still thinks relatively highly of Julian – on the rare occasions he thinks of him at all.

It's a cute idea, but O'Hara is painfully serious about the whole thing. If you read a biography of the author, he comes across as an inveterate and insufferable snob, and this also comes across in Appointment in Samarra. The depiction of Julian's social scene – with the town of Gibbsville being a fictional carbon-copy of the town O'Hara himself was raised in – would only really be tolerable if there was an element of satire to it, whether black or comic, but there is none. Instead, there is an indulgent morass of WASP frippery, some inconsequential writerly tangents that any merciful editor would have excised, and scarce few characters who transcend the cardboard cutouts O'Hara has designated for them. The book is quite well-written but the indulgence spoils it, and the ending is anti-climactic. Appointment in Samarra might be respectable enough, but it is disappointing and doesn't reward the amount of effort one must put into it. A largely shallow tale about some shallow people.

In the 1930s, John O'Hara wrote 4 novels that put him, albeit briefly, on the map of literary writing. His "Appointment in Samarra," "Butterfield 8," "Hope of Heaven," & "Our Pal Joey," are compiled here. His last major work "Our Pal Joey" was made into a musical. After this decade of writing, he was forgotten in spite of his shocking sexualized character in "Butterfield 8." Somewhat interesting read but fails to hold readers' attention.

I came to this novel having seen the 1957 film version and being intrigued with the film and wondering how faithful it was to the novel. I was surprised to find that the core of the film was not the main body of the novel, but only covered the final thirty pages or so. Yet this was no disappointment. I'd not read O'Hara before, but I will read more. This is a rather wonderful novel encompassing decades in the life of the central figure, Joe Chapin, a well-to-do Pennsylvania lawyer. The novel, told in one 390-page chapter and one 18-page one, skips around chronologically, but always fluidly, organically, as if the characters and time periods were taking turns with the story. It is filled with rich characters, some spectacular writing, and sometimes that writing reaches the level of magnificence. It is filled with insights into the wealthy of a middling-sized city in the first half of the twentieth century, and some of O'Hara's descriptions of political thought could have been written today. In the end, it made me care deeply about the sort of man one might not particularly care for. It is a real work of art, expressed with a wry poetry and an unblinking eye.

The ending really smaltzed it up. It was laughable.

The novel explores the life of Gloria Wandrous, a young woman having an affair with Weston Liggett, an older, married businessman. Set in New York circa 1931, it fills in her family background and sexual history, and it locates her within a circle of friends, their relationships, and economic struggles, providing a closely observed tour of "the sordid and sensational lives of people on the fringe of café society and the underworld".[4] The minor character of Jimmy Malloy, a junior newspaper reporter, serves as O'Hara’s alter ego; he has the style of a Yale University graduate but not the means.[5]

The title of the novel derives from the pattern of telephone exchange names in the United States and Canada. Until the early 1970s, telephone exchanges were indicated by two letters and commonly referred to by names instead of by numbers, with the BU represented on the telephone dial as "28," followed by four digits. In December 1930 an additional digit was appended to the exchange name. BUtterfield was an exchange that provided service to Manhattan's well-to-do Upper East Side, and BUtterfield 8 was still new when the novel was published.[5]

Meh. Is it that it's so dated? Is it that it's stories take place "back east"? Is it O'Hara's social class? I wonder, but these stories seem racist and misogynistic. Actually pretty boring.

Not much to this one, IMHO.

2.5, rounded up.

I found this rather dated. It is no longer shocking when a young girl has affairs with older men, or when they have sex promiscuously (sad fact, but true). Without the shock factor, the central character, Gloria, seemed more of a self-destructive, careless and unfeeling person than she might have seemed in 1935. She was not a character that I could make a real connection with, and none of the other characters was the least bit likeable either. I couldn’t help thinking that I was glad not to live in 1930s New York City if it was as cynical as this.

The book itself made me think of the story of The Black Dahlia, in that the girl in question, Gloria, seemed that same sort of misguided person, seeking love in all the wrong places, and wondering why she was outside the norm and not like the other girls around her. O’Hara does succeed in conveying the desperation of the times, mostly through glib conversations that seemed to me poor imitations of Fitzgerald.

O’Hara based this story on his imaginings of the life of a young girl whose body was washed up on a beach in Long Island, with no account for how she had died. It is a pretty grim story, in the way that depression era stories can be, with an overall cloud of despair seeming to wrap around the characters’ souls. I suppose I was looking for some glimmer of hope or moral fiber and found none at all. Perhaps that was intentional, after all it would take a severe lack of both to create a girl like Gloria.

I have Appointment in Samarra in line to read, and will still read in despite this not being a great book for me. Some authors write in a way that transcends their time. Based on this novel alone, I don’t think O’Hara was one of those. I think he was a man of his time, with little to say that would propel his popularity forward.

Four stars for the novel, which is hilarious. The libretto is--, well maybe you have to see it performed to enjoy.

Once things start unraveling for Julian English, the tragic hero of this small-town hero-to-zero tale, they do so exponentially. The pacing here is terrific — somehow English's decline spins out of control against the oh-so-static backdrop of the well-to-do set he's a part of. So there's a frantic kind of parallax going on as the more things change for Julian, the more they stay the same for everyone else. This is an essential entry in the canon of self-destruction imo, because of course there's no real reason why it has to happen — like the scariest downward-spirals, it just has to be that way.

Also a very interesting book for the way it portrays its characters' sex-lives. It's realistic and mature, even by today's standards I think.

This was my first John O'Hara book, so I was unprepared for his style -- and I'm not sure he was consistent from book to book, so I may be going out on a limb, here -- but O'Hara could be the love child of J.D.Salinger (for his ear for contemporary speech patterns) and Stephen King (for his deft mini-portraits of minor characters).

The story is sad; the book is matter-of-fact. Prostitutes live dangerous lives. New York is full of drinkers, saints, hard-drinking musicians, frat boys, and men who cheat on their wives. The Depression took a hard toll on people, good and bad.

People fall in love, sometimes with strong certainty and sometimes with doubts.
People meet with accidents.

Definitely did not use a ghost writer, unlike some other presidents.

O'Hara tiene el don de escuchar hasta el más mínimo de los matices en las conversaciones normales, y también el de saber reproducirlas en todo su esplendor. Y aunque, con la verdad no basta, consigue hacer arte, con ella. Los finales de los relatos además, son una obra de arte para este crudo realismo que impregna estas historias casi mágicas.

O'Hara's roman à clef follows a handful of New Yorkers and their lives, all of whom have some connection to 20-something slightly-scandalous gal-about-town, Gloria Wandrous, and it culminates in the affair she has with the older, married Weston Liggett and the aftermath of that affair.
I usually don't like this kind of novel very well; the characters are a too ordinary-everyday kind of flawed (I generally need my characters to be flawed in a more supernatural or flashy or epic kind of way, I guess) and the plot spends too much time inside their heads, and I usually get impatient with that sort of thing. But O'Hara writing is good enough that I don't mind it, I suppose, because I kind of loved this book (and I kind of loved Appointment in Samarra, too). I'm not sure that I'm supposed to like these characters - they're not exactly made up of loveable actions and motives - but I do, and maybe that's the point? Maybe that's O'Hara's special talent? Anyway, I loved it and I am beginning to think that I love him, too.½

This is a huge book....which does not always work well with my busy life.....and i have been slogging through for nearly 4 months to complete it, and today i finally succeeded! This was somewhat epic in scope, and although i really enjoy O'Hara and his keen insight, the topic, characters and overall story did not match in intensity and interest. I grew up in PA, where this all starts, and enjoyed the PA family names and the very real feel of the settings, both familiar and unfamiliar. The nagging thought that kept cropping up over this long reading period of mine is: where is this going? Honestly, I cannot really say. It is an in-depth study of one soul, and those very few people close to him, from birth til 50......a hard-working chaser of success, coupled with duty and a basic good heart, but completely human in his failings on all fronts....business, personal, family, etc. I'm left feeling slightly sad. No overall regrets, other than i wish my life allowed it to happen in less than 4 months....maybe i'd see it slightly differently.....oh, and there are hardly any chapter breaks at all.....my copy was 981 pages!!! Sometimes i just need a sensible stopping point - to relieve the overwhelming task at hand. It says on my copy that it was about to become a miniseries.....I'll be looking into whether or not that came to pass. Proceed, but with caution.½

Another novel that is a strong mix of what I liked and didn't like. Thus. we end in the middle with three stars. The writing style felt old, out-dated. It reminded me a bit of Booth Tarkington's work, especially The Magnificent Ambersons. It is hard to believe that John O'Hara was a contemporary of Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck. And then there is the subject matter. A white man from a wealthy family who had all of the advantages struggles to achieve his life's dreams. Not very inspiring or appealing.

And yet. Published in 1955, this novel addresses honestly and transparently many of the cultural blemishes and warts of the time: pre-marital sex, the resulting pregnancies and abortions, extramarital affairs by men and women, female as compared to male satisfaction from sex, class relations, alcoholism, the advantages of being born into the right family, etc. Politics and business relationships are integral to the story and described intelligently and in detail. It is all here. The writing is quite good, and the dialogue is excellent.

A good read and a great commentary on a part of American society, but stylistically tired and tedious.

too old

Quotable:

"Our story never ends.

"You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded. That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated. It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents. It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others. Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot. Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or in a rabbit’s foot. Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him . . ."

Awesome use of the English language, much like [a:Damon Runyon|13943|Damon Runyon|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1344897293p2/13943.jpg]. Also: Mount Holyoke sighting in the second to last chapter!

A deeply pessimistic look at the idiocy and falsehood of American life when there was a glossy finish on the outside to hide faults, flaws, kinks, and desires. At times Julian English reminded me a little bit of J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man, but without as much wittism or humor or nuance. Perhaps my issue is that all the characters save Julian and Caroline are simple mechanisms. The moments of self-awareness are there for the lead characters and there is some level of insight into the need to create a identity that we can not only present to the world, but also to ourselves in a coherent way. It's a sad point. While likely very true today, I imagine it was even more glaring in O'Hara's day. All told, this novel should probably be considered a minor classic of American Lit. particularly for that era.½

I read this because I was wondering about the large scar on Eddie Fisher's face that can be seen in the movie of this novel. He didn't mention the scar in his first autobiography. There is no back story to the scar in the movie so I read this novel to see if there was one there but there isn't. As such I started reading only the passages that concerned Fisher's character, Eddie Brunner but O'Hara's observations about contemporary society are fascinating so I slowed down and started to read every page. The cause of Gloria's death is unexplained which I did not like.