Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the 20th Century was a revelatory reading list for me when it first came out several years ago. Though I now recognize the tremendous weaknesses of the list (most importantly that it only involves English language novels and grossly underrepresents female authors), at the time it was the best resource I had found. I might go so far as to say it was the inspiration that got me back into reading novels, after the first couple years of college had stripped me of the energy to read anything that was not assigned.

I immediately began reading books that I'd only barely heard of before, like Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King; the latter is now one of my favorite books. In the years since, I've greatly expanded my reading list, largely on the basis of The New Lifetime Reading Plan, so my progress through the Modern Library List has slowed. But I still have quite a few books from that list on my shelf, and last week I picked up #22, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra.

Unbeknowst to me at the time, O'Hara's book is apparently one of the most controversial selections on the Modern Library list:

[W]riting in the Atlantic Monthly in March, 2000, critic Benjamin Schwarz and writer Christina Schwarz claimed: "So widespread is the literary world's scorn for John O'Hara that the inclusion... of Appointment in Samarra on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best [English-language] novels of the twentieth century was used to ridicule the entire project."

I'm not sure that its inclusion itself merits such ridicule, but certainly it's placement at #22, ahead of books like William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, is one of the list's many flaws.

Though overrated on the Modern Library list, the book has its strengths. Experiencing the slow boil of Julian English, particularly in his drunken internal monologues, is a bit like finally getting inside the head of one of Raymond Carver's alcoholics. There is a sad, unexplained inevitability to English's self-destruction, but O'Hara subtly avoids showing the worst of it until late in the book.

Until then, we see the build-up of English's discontent, but the narration quickly cuts away before the release, and we are left to hear about it from other characters or through English's reminiscences. The latter are brought up in English's confrontations with his unhappy wife, Caroline, some of the most powerful passages in the book. It becomes increasingly clear that English is not just losing control of himself, but is losing his sense of himself, and this dislocation is the driving force in his downfall.

Perhaps it is merely the proximity of my own reading of Carver that has me drawing parallels, but the shared subject matter of alcoholism and broken marriages seems enough to invite some comparison. Carver's minimalism leaves much unspoken just below the surface, while O'Hara dives forcefully into English's psyche. Yet for all that, English's self-destruction is no more explicable, and the reader is left to sort out why and how a man can so completely unravel in three short days.

Mildly recommended for fans of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other purveyors of alcohol lit in the early twentieth century.