Gibbsville

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA--John O'Hara--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Presented is the city of Gibbsville, Pa. (pop.: 24,032), battening on the anthracite coal industry at a time when the Depression was called the Slump. In a story of only three days, John O'Hara succeeds in covering as much ground about Gibbsville as Sinclair Lewis did in describing Gopher Prairie (Main Street) in three years. He writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality.

The story is one of liquor, love and fights, of the Lantenengo Street smart set of Gibbsville, of the town's underworld. Julian and Caroline English, married four years and still in love with each other, attend a Christmas Eve party at the Lantenengo Country Club. There Julian gets drunk, dashes his highball into the fat face of the richest man in town whose stories are a bore. Result: a black eye for the richest man in town, new enemies for Julian, a fight with Caroline.

Christmas night sees another party at the Club at which Julian proceeds to get drunk again. The quarreling Englishes traipse along with other youngsters to the Stage Coach. Turning his back on Caroline, Julian takes a roadhouse entertainer outside. It was a bad choice; the girl belonged to Gibbsville's No. 1 underworldling. Day after Christmas Julian is still in a black mood when friends rake him over the coals. That night, getting drunk alone in his house, he realizes what a fool he has made of himself in three days. He goes out to the garage, shuts the door, starts the motor. But the story does not end.

Author John O'Hara, 29, is a rolling stone who has travelled from his hometown Pottsville, Pa. Journal to the Paramount studios in Hollywood. He has contributed stories to The New Yorker, Scrib- ner's, Vanity Fair. "In addition," he says, "I have jerked soda, worked on two railroads and in a steel mill, on an ocean liner and a farm . . . bummed east and west, was a day laborer. I was married once. ..." Appointment in Samarra is his first novel. A volume of his short stories, The Doctor's Son, will be published this autumn.

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