Word: samarra
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...wife Lillian. (Says she: "I was his queen.") His blue Cadillac bore the license plates "S.L.R." In 1959 Sam developed a heart ailment, complicated by diabetes. He sold his busi ness and moved to Phoenix. Some time in the next two years he began to plan his appointment in Samarra. He scanned the classified ads in the Phoenix papers looking for one "will-do-anything" kind of situation-wanted ad. At least five unemployed men were approached by Resnick, and all refused to kill him. One reported his strange interview to the police but was unable to identify Resnick...
JOHN O'Hara's latest work, Assembly, is another colossal waste of talent. For years, we have waited for O'Hara to live up to the considerable promise he showed in Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8; but, with an occasional exception, he has been content to turn out slick, meaningless potboilers...
This collection of three related novellas is John O'Hara's best work in years. The stories remind one strongly of the author's early novels, and not only because the suicide of Julian English, the hero of Appointment in Samarra, is an offstage incident in one of them. The prose has the great clarity of all of O'Hara's writing, and an economy of expression that he has seemed afraid to trust in such vast recent novels as From the Terrace and Ten North Frederick...
...publisher on the promised date, but it is increasingly clear that this external discipline has been paid for with the loss of inner form and tension. Diffuse, repetitious, overly detailed, Terrace suffers badly from the fallacy that to fill space is to conquer time. When Appointment in Samarra appeared almost a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald had a challenger. From the Terrace is probably the best novel O'Hara has written since Samarra; but he is still the challenger...
...leaving one. The one he has chosen to hate and not permit his readers to leave is a place called Gibbsville, Pa. (he was born in Pottsville, Pa.). The same people are present in this Zenith-on-the-Schuylkill as lived when Julian English made his famous Appointment in Samarra. Old Dr. English is older and discouraged, but Novelist O'Hara, though older (50), is not discouraged...