Published: November 01. 2009 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick

I am a pretty conscientious reader, and have been most of my life. My mother likes to tell the story that, when I was a child, I read books so fast I did not even break their spines, and I remember being taken to the library and the bookstore, walking away with my arms full only to return again the next week. It is a luxury, when we are children, to devour what we love.

Even so, there are great holes in my canon. There always seems to be one of those lists circulating of the most wonderful novels of all time, and invariably I’ve never even heard of a dozen of them. Part of that is fashion, part generation, but the idea of rediscovering a great book that nobody ever reads anymore has become a nice little passion of mine lately, kind of like star search in reverse.

To these ends, I borrowed a copy of John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra.”
It’s not really fair to say I’ve avoided this book, but I did have a very wrong idea about it, that it took place somewhere in the Middle East maybe, the desert definitely, and so then would have to be as existential and wearying as most Paul Bowles. The kind of thing you are one day proud to have survived, but would not read again.
I could not have been more wrong.

“Appointment in Samarra” is chatty and fast, with a huge cast of speakers from mobsters to coal scions, from the high bred to the high and tight, and everybody, everybody wants in somebody else’s pants. This is the last gasp of the Jazz Age at its most naturalistic, set against the backdrop of Pennsylvania coal country. The citizens of Gibbsville are more isolated than Gatsby’s, but no less stratified: There are rules for the polite number of Prohibition ryes at the Latenengo Country Club, the polite number of dances to offer the single girls, how long to wait for your wife at the bottom of the stairs, and on this occasion, this Christmastime at the dawning of the Great Depression, Julian English is disregarding all of them. From the late-night depths of the club’s smoking room, he throws a drink in the face of boorish Harry Reilly, one of the richest men in town.

This is a problem because Julian sells Cadillacs, and Harry is a potential customer. Harry also keeps a devoted friendship with Julian’s wife, Caroline, and Harry holds a grudge. And when Julian goes on Christmas morning to apologize, the news of the affront spreading like a flash fire through town, Harry won’t even see him to hear it.
Thus begins Julian’s self-destructive slide, and though the story centers around him, we hear almost as much from the people he lives among — the bootlegger he calls a friend, the torch singer he misbehaves with, Caroline as she fell in love with him, and Caroline now, embarrassed, confused, losing her grip on the man she married. Julian’s final appointment is the one of the title, an appointment with fate, devastatingly complete.