Pretty brilliant, although to be honest I could have done without a couple of stories. Chandler gets predictable at times, with the way his characters behave and what he wants you to understand about them. That said, the bright spots in this book are incredible. I think my favorite stories are the first and last. The first, which I think is just called "Fat," just woke me right up. I'd just put down The Gifts of the State and the gap between his mastery and theirs was just so apparent from the first couple of pages. And the last story, for which the book is named, is beautiful and sad. A lot of the stories are, I suppose, but the title story is just the most poignant.
In fact, if I had to choose a single word to describe the book, I might go with "poignant."
I didn't enjoy it as much as Appointment in Samarra, although they're not as similar as I was expecting. O'Hara's great themes, to me, are solipsism and even narcissism and the way those can cloud our view of the world around us and our place in it; our smallness in the universe; and the damage that we can do if we don't manage to step back and understand who we are and where we are. Chandler's stories are all about self-discovery, and how brutal that process can be. His characters are smaller than O'Hara's, wrestling with subtler demons.
Still, I'm drawn to the comparison. Maybe it's just that both men wrote about middle-class semi-urban Americans in the mid-twentieth century, and that both have a bleak outlook.
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