Appointment in Samarra

I took a little hiatus from the list after finishing Henry Miller in order to give Ann some time to catch up. She has way more obligations than I do, which means she has way less time to read. But now that she is long done with I, Claudius and well into Tropic of Cancer, we can safely proceed.

It was so lovely to return to "normal" fiction. Graves's novel was more or a historical recounting (however well written), and Miller was experimental and self-cousciously weak narratively. With O'Hara, we have something more classical, with a protagonist; a problem; a beginning, middle, and end. Oh, sweet joy!

This was the first novel since Light in August to have characters and characterizations that I could really sink my teeth into. The plot here is driven by the characters. And while most of the characters are interesting and well-developed, Julian English is of course the centerpiece of our view of Gibbsville. There is a lot not to like about Julian. He has racist impulses, he cheats on his wife, and he turns to alcohol an awful lot. But O'Hara does an impressive job of making Julian very sympathetic and understandable. The things he does, he does for a reason. And his negative actions and thoughts are balanced by his self-criticisms (or is that self-loathing?) and his knowledge that he has to face up to things. I found the scene in which he returns to Caroline after trying to reconcile with Reilly the first time very touching. He takes those steps slowly and heavily to let her know what happened. He does not mislead her for sex. Similarly, after he has his fight at the club and is driving out of town, he comes to his senses and realizes that he cannot run away, that he must return and meet with Lute. He is funny and endearing even as we watch him make mistake after mistake. O'Hara lets our feelings for Julian be an entire experience, where we can sit outside and critique Julian but at the same time nod with each decision, understanding why. When he climbs into the running car to end his life, we see how trapped he is (or at least how trapped he feels) and can't condemn even if we don't condone.

O'Hara's attempt to treat Caroline the same was is impressive, even as it comes up short. I got the feeling that the heart of Caroline had many chambers that O'Hara couldn't access. He knew of the complexities; he knew of the disappointments; he knew that hidden desires existed; But I think that in the end he didn't know the specifics or how they played out. His one train-of-thought passage from inside Caroline's mind, something he does with no other character, not even Julian, shows that he was going to extreme lengths to get in there. In fact, I was so happy to see an author have such lively and human female characters. Caroline, Irma, Frances, Libby, Alice -- they all exhibit the same racist, defensive, combative, and carnal traits that the men of the novel do.

The racism in the novel seems to be something other than gratuitous. The novel is filled with groups with strict borders. There is the Lantenengo Street people and the regular Joes. The Catholics and the Protestants. The club members and the guests and those entirely excluded. The Jews. The Poles. The Irish. The younger kids and the young adults. All those boundaries crossed and mingled at points, but they could harden in a heartbeat and create social pressures and problems. It is all these hardening borders that isolate Julian at the end of the novel. He sees himself ruined with Reilly, cut off by the Catholics, despised by the Irish, Pollocks, and veterans, too old for the young girls, denied by the women of his age, hated by people he thought were friends but who would side with Caroline and/or Reilly, and he has an enemy in Ed Charney as far as he knows. The small town politics leave nowhere for him to go. The novel feels observational in this respect. O'Hara is clearly critical, but he does not prescribe some solution or provide any exit. When the dust settles on Julian's suicide, life will continue in Gibbsville, and everyone else will suffer from the same structure. People will put two and two together and get five, as Reilly's sister points out. In this novel and in the minds of hungry observers, two plus two always equals five.

This post is now officially too long, so I'll merely add a few concluding thoughts and questions. The title and opening narrative suggest and interesting interplay between fate and the decisions we make. Julian's death is determined long before it occurs, and all his decisions, no matter what he intends, lead him straight and inevitably to that point. Or is there more to it than that?

Julian's nickname is Ju. Is this related to the racism of the novel, in which Ju is a homonym for Jew?

Why begin and end with Lute and Irma? How do they set up the world of the novel and the values and concerns at issue? Is it important that this novel happens in the first year after the stock market crash of 1929? Why do we spend so much time with Al Grecco when he plays such a small part in the novel and absolutely no part in the conclusion?

Cue the crickets.