Appointment in Samarra.

I’ve said many times that my favorite American-born author is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night is still the best American novel I’ve ever read, and of course The Great Gatsby belongs near the top of any rankings of the most important novels ever written. Fitzgerald’s literary output was short – four completed novels and forty or fifty short stories – so when I find an author who counts Fitzgerald as a major influence, he gets an automatic five-point bonus. John O’Hara is one such writer.

Appointment in Samarra was his masterwork, a cutting FSFesque look at the destructive effects of alcohol and small-town society on one man and his marriage. It was controversial in its time for its harsh language (tame by our standards) and frank treatment of sexuality (same), and that seems to have led reviewers even to this day to denigrate its quality as a novel.

The book opens with an epigraph from W. Somerset Maugham, which provides the novel with its title and the reader with a clue as to how the plot ends:

DEATH SPEAKS:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go on to Samarra and there Death will not find me.” The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The novel tells the story of the self-destruction of Julian English, a happily married man who owns the Cadillac dealership in his small Pennsylvania town, but whose temper and tendency to drink to excess lead him into a three-day spiral where he destroys just about everything in his life. By limiting the scope to just 72 hours, O’Hara gives us a deeper level of detail into the lives of English and some of the book’s secondary characters, and his dialogue crackles, bringing life into mundane conversations, where every phrase seems to open the window into its speaker’s character just a few millimeters more.

Comparing O’Hara’s prose to Fitzgerald’s is unfair; the latter was a master of using beautiful phrases to describe even the most harrowing sequences, unparalleled in American fiction. O’Hara works with a greater economy of words, and his prose is often more jagged, in line with the plot but not up to Fitzgerald’s impossible standard. Appointment in Samarra would otherwise fit comfortably in Fitzgerald’s canon, right alongside the similar story in The Beautiful and Damned (another marriage on the rocks, but a much longer tale), with the same alcohol-drenched setting and unflinching look at how we treat each other and how we respond to our environments.