--- Michael Robison <
miker_zspider@yahoo.com> wrote:
> FOCUS ON APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA, by Matthew
Bruccoli
>
> Matthew Bruccoli has a well-written piece on
author
> John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra. He notes
that
> the hardboiled nature of O'Hara's novel lies more
in
> the unsentimental delivery than in the personality
of
> the characters, and that O'Hara's
greatest
> significance lies in his ability to reproduce life
as
> it was. Appointment in Samarra came out in 1934,
the
> same year as Hammett's last novel, The Thin Man,
and
> James Cain's landmark noir The Postman Always
Rings
> twice, and Bruccoli points out the
striking
> similarities, the "uninvolved viewpoint,
economical
> style, accurate speech, dirty words, frank
sex."
> Bruccoli identifies the influence of Sinclair
Lewis
> and F. Scott Fitzgerald on O'Hara's style in
the
> novel. He points to Edmund Wilson's observation
in
> "Boys in the Back Room" that social snobbery
is
> O'Hara's main theme. Bruccoli concludes: "there
are
> more elegant stylists, more profound thinkers,
more
> sensitive spirits. There is no working writer
who
> matches O'Hara's importance as a social
historian."
Hi miker,
Thanks for the interesting (and detailed) overview of
Madden's collection of essays. As an aside, Bruccoli was a
fan of Ed Lacy. More to the point, I believe O'Hara has
fallen out of favor in The Academy though in his day, he was
widely read if not overpublished. I've enjoyed several of his
novels, including _Samarra_ and _From the Terrace_. I didn't
realize that O'Hara's first book coincided with Cain's
_Postman_.
Ed Lynskey
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