Appointment in Samarra depicts the cruel undercurrents of small town life: like Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt, and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, it chronicles the disappointment and pettiness among the nominally upstanding citizens. Its writing is still crisp, 72 years later, and the story filled with astute analysis of the eternal pack hierarchy. Keen social commentary from the omniscient narrator dissects each socially fraught situation, with money and attractiveness being the chief determiners of rank, as they so often are. But even those with both sometimes fall.

Appointment in Samarra stresses conformity. The descent of Julian English and his wife begins with a faux pas and continues with a general disregard for trying to regain their society’s grace. Although they are supposed to conform to a set of place-specific standards, their dilemma is almost palpable. There are standards, both obvious and not, that do offer rewards for adherence and punishment for deviation in all societies.

Although the setting doesn’t have as much resonance as it once did—who cares about the smallville country club set?—the characters could be easily transplanted to the contemporary suburbs. I wonder if the suspicion of the dominant physical place in literature has changed: for a long time the city and civilization were seen as corrupt and corrupting, a strand running from Cooper to Edith Wharton and beyond. Then the revisionists wrote about the country, including John O’Hara in Appointment in Samarra and the others named above. Finally, suburbs seem to chiefly occupy the contemporary writer, with Tom Perrotta’s Little Children and movies like American Beauty expressing skepticism of the dominant living structure of the late 20th and early 21st century.