The speed with which the book was written may account for the urgency of its storytelling. 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. 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. 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: an appointment in Samarra, we know from the beginning, is an appointment with death itself. 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. 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. 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. He knew he was in for it.”
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. O’Hara had “a feral appetite to know things,” his biographer Geoffrey Wolff has said, and his book 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 highball, and cars—cars especially. They are practically characters in Appointment, where it matters that Julian English owns the local Cadillac dealership. 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. 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. (O’Hara’s own car of choice, when he could afford one, was a Rolls-Royce, and to ensure its safety he drove it to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and had it blessed by a monsignor.)
Appointment is also authoritative about class and drinking—along with sex, O’Hara’s two other great themes. O’Hara was an avid student of both and, until he finally went on the wagon, a famously nasty and quarrelsome drunk. He even attempted once to punch out a dwarf at the ‘21’ Club in New York. Bars, especially in his early years, were a research laboratory for O’Hara—they were where he came by so much of that knowingness—and in his early novels alcohol is the volatile fuel that propels the plot. When Appointment opens, Julian English is already well on his way to becoming a precocious alcoholic, if he isn’t there already, and in one way the story of his downfall is really the story of a single, epic binge, ending with a giant highball he mixes for himself in a flower vase.
Alcohol in O’Hara is the great loosener, a potion that makes people feel sexy and amorous, and in his books set during Prohibition it’s also a powerful leveler, a solvent eating away at the foundations of the social order and mingling the country club set with gangsters and their girlfriends and the likes of the bootlegger Ed Charney, a social arbiter in his own way and possibly the most powerful person in the county. Even the mixing of a living room cocktail, in a home as proper as Julian’s stiff-necked parents’, carries with it a whiff of corruption, and no one is exempt, not even the clergy. In one surprising scene in Appointment, Julian shares a companionable drink in a country club locker room with Monsignor Creedon, the pastor of the local Catholic church, who has to say Mass the next morning. He hesitates, looking at his watch, and then says, “All right. I’ve time. I’ll have one with you.”
The O’Haras were Catholics, and well-to-do. John was the eldest of eight children, born in 1905 to a prominent Pottsville physician. The family lived on Mahantongo Street (Lantenengo Street in the novel, the town’s toniest neighborhood) in a mansion that once belonged to the Yuengling brewing family. They owned five automobiles, a weekend farm, and a string of show horses, and belonged to all the town’s best clubs. Yet for whatever reason, O’Hara felt his Irishness and his Catholicism marked him as an outsider, and he became an obsessive observer of social hierarchy. He studied class indicators—clothes, college slang, fraternity pins and handshakes, membership lists—the way the Duc de Saint-Simon studied the rituals and pecking order at the court of Louis Quatorze. “To read him on a fashionable bar or the Gibbsville country club,” Edmund Wilson once wrote of O’Hara, “is to be shown on the screen of a fluoroscope gradations of social prestige of which one had not before been aware.”
As Julian reflects at one point, “by the time a man reached junior year in college he knew how he was situated in the country club social life,” and the novel extends this awareness of hierarchy into an entire social taxonomy. There’s Lantenengo Street, where the country club set lives, and then, down the hill, Christiana Street, home to the town’s middle class: a butcher, a motorman, a freight clerk, two bookkeepers for the coal company, a Baptist minister, a garage mechanic. The Flieglers don’t belong to the country club: when they want a drink or two they go with their friends, other Pennsylvania Dutch couples—the Schaeffers, the Ziegenfusses, the Hartensteins—to one of the roadhouses on the outskirts of town. Still farther out are the little coal mining villages, or “patches,” home to “the hunkeys, the schwackies, the roundheaders, the broleys,” who can’t afford bootleg liquor and drink boilo, or homemade moonshine, instead.
O’Hara himself became a shameless social climber and poseur, the kind of person who collected matchbooks and ties from clubs he couldn’t get into and left them casually lying around his house. Especially as a young man he was probably a know-it-all, but his book doesn’t show off. It has some of the same factual density, the careful attention to small detail, as Updike’s Rabbit novels, also set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Rabbit even becomes a car dealer. “I guess I love this place,” a mostly sober Julian thinks, looking over a snowy Pennsylvania landscape, and the same is true of O’Hara, who in his writing returned again and again to Gibbsville, making it an entire miniature world, a northern Yoknapatawpha. If you want to know what it was like to live in 1930s America, Appointment in Samarra isn’t a bad place to start. You can get some of the same information from Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street but not in such urgent fashion. And while Appointment is dated in some ways, its stinging class awareness—its sense of everyone looking over his or her shoulder and scrabbling for a place on the social ladder—feels as current as the novels of Tom Wolfe.