“And I would like to say”, Julian said to
himself, “that I thought it was about time someone shut him up.”
This is a key line in John O’Hara’s first
and tightest novel, Appointment in Samarra. Julien English is a man who is
going down in the little bourgeois court society of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania.
The act that precipitates and quickens the fall happens in the country club, as
he stands there listening to an ascending boss figure named Harry Reilly, who
owns a good chunk of Julian English’s car lot. Reilly is telling a dirty story
in a fake Irish accent and is surrounded by suckups who say things like, Harry,
I don’t know how you remember all them stories! A Ring Lardner scene, Lardner
would have dispatched the entire book in 15 pages, but O’hara is not a
humorist, nor does he favor going short on material like this.
The American novel – even one in which the
characters are all white burgomeister types with Caddies and country club
memberships – does a wonderful job of tracing the male fugue within the precincts
of an ethos of success that has begun to fatigue its a regulars, even as they
fail to imagine any other ethos. Winner or loser, that is not only how the game
ends, it defines the game’s purpose.
Will Smith slapping a comedian whose line
is that ur-American trope, the roast, is very much the Julian English figure.
My sympathies are with Smith – whose slap musta hurt and, in some metaphysical
accounting, must have equaled or topped the little bit of shit the comedian
wanted Smith to swallow before he got his award. However, the country club has
rules, and will ring them down swiftly like the grating over a jewelry store display
window.
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