"Oh. So what did you say to him?" said Irma is the last sentence and the only sentence of the book I have read. I liked the rhyme of the title and the author: Have you read O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra?The cover design is good too - sexy woman in yellow dress having her ear-ring flicked by a man - pent-up lust and fear combined. In the background are shelves full of glasses. It would be impossible to take one glass down without bringing loads of others after it.

A hard-won lesson of maturity: if you are not enjoying a novel, stop. Even if it is objectively quite well done.

"...Books should be about the people you know, that you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about... In the meantime, since it is Christmas, if you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara. Then when you have more time read another book called War and Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or very important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now."
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, pg. 184

This book is set in a fictional Pottsville, PA but one unlike the one I’ve seen. This is the Roaring Twenties and wealthy, Ivy League educated coal barons live the high life of conspicuous consumption. O’Hara really captures in journalistic prose the self-destruction of impulsive alcoholic Julian English. It’s all rather cringe-worthy actually. And the conversations of the characters are captured in all their banality that just add to the futility of the situation.

“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 pensions 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 see 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…” - p. 251 ( )