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A bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 was inspired by a news account of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman washed up on a Long Island beach. Was it an accident, a murder, a suicide? The circumstances of her death were never resolved, but O’Hara seized upon the tragedy to imagine the woman’s down-and-out life in New York City in the early 1930s.
“O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character,” Fran Lebowitz writes in her Introduction. With brash honesty and a flair for the unconventional, BUtterfield 8 lays bare the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The result is a masterpiece of American fiction.
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- ISBN13: 9780812966985- Condition: NEW
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By Chris (Bountiful, UT United States)
There are a number of "classics" sitting on my shelves to be read. This summer I picked up BUtterfield 8 and dove right in. I had almost no idea what to expect. I'd never seen the movie and hadn't really ever heard anything about the story. Reading the back cover gave a slight insight, but still left me wondering what to expect.
The book started out a little slow, but still very vivid. O'Hara writes with great description and passion and was able to make the scenes very alive and full. However, for the first few chapters, the book felt rather disjointed to me and I felt a little disoriented and confused. There were a ton of characters dropped in and I wasn't yet sure who was important and who was peripheral.
Looking back, I think the disorientation could be a deliberate stylistic choice. Our central characters are all caught up in a whirlwind of life's adventures filled with big hopes and dreams, but still just whipped around dizzyingly by real life interactions.
Pushing through the first few chapters, I found myself getting really attached to the characters. This is really a character driven novel and the characters are deep and engaging. It was a while before I even knew the name of the girl I was following around for the first few pages and I wasn't sure yet if I was supposed to be sympathetic to or disgusted by her situation, but I still felt compelled by her and wanted to know more. As Gloria Wandrous grew more and more alive and as I learned more of her back story and current situation, she began to feel truly real and I found myself sympathizing for her.
Many of the themes of the book dealt with Gloria's sexuality both in the present world and with the encounters of her youth. O'Hara isn't explicit/graphic with his sexual content, but I can see where even the allusions he presents could be controversial both then and now. Sexuality is often a taboo subject anyway. Add to that the molestation/rape of a young girl and the subject becomes all the more disputable.
O'Hara doesn't wholly portray Gloria as a victim, which would be a natural response. He does explore her psychology and reactions, but he also gives her an inner strength and drive. I really enjoyed the description of her conflicted moral judgments. She has a real desire to love and be loved, but she has a low sense of self worth because of her past that she feels she has to live up to.
In addition to the depth in Gloria's character, the book also expounds on the sexuality and behaviors of all the other characters.
Weston Ligget, the male love interest for Gloria, is a character with a lot of depth though it's harder to feel sympathetic towards him. I feel almost sorry for him in that he does seem like he genuinely wants to care for Gloria, but at the same time, I read his love as more of an infatuation based on the thrill of the chase and the excitement of the affair. He just sends off the creepy vibe through his pedophiliac/incestual behavior not to mention his infidelity and reckless abandon.
I really liked Eddie as Gloria's best friend. Part of me hoped that they would somehow get a romance going, but I knew early on that any chance of love between them was totally ill-fated.
I've spoken mostly about the characters and this really is a character driven novel. The characters are the life of the book. The plot itself felt a little thin. It was compelling only in the fact that I was attached to Gloria. The environment of New York and the speakeasies was meticulously created and felt very real and compelling. The dialog was fresh and real.
The themes and content, while somewhat controversial and dated to the ~20s/30s, were still strikingly relevant in our modern society. The 21st century club scene is obviously a little different than that of the speakeasies. The stresses and concerns of modern day 20-somethings and white-collar-30+s have become more technologically advanced, but the general worries are still very similar.
People want to be loved. They want to be accepted. They want to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world. They want to overcome the problems of their past and be able to take control of their future.
This novel has a lot of great themes to think on and wonderful characters to help open up the realities hiding under the pasted on smiles of society. I would have liked to have seen some better resolution or morale at the end of the story, but it still left something to think about. Probably my biggest complaint was the "200 pound gorilla in the room" that's alluded to on the back cover by telling us that O'Hara was inspired to write this book when he read a news article about an unknown girl found dead in the East River. With that in mind, I knew what was coming and new the book couldn't end well.
Still, I hoped for a little more enlightenment or for something more to come from the impending death. In that regard, the book left me somewhat disappointed...a bit of metafiction, placing me inside Gloria's own disappointment with the world.
Overall, it was a book worth reading. I enjoyed the reality of it, the depth of the characters and the interesting themes. The pacing was a bit slow and disjointed, especially early on, and the plot itself felt a bit contrived at moments. Still, I am glad I read it and will likely seek out more O'Hara to put on my shelf.
****
3.5 stars (out of 5)
By D. Olinger
O'Hara's BUtterfield 8 is not as theological rich as reading
Graham Greene, but its close and the pages turn just as quickly.
His style is superb and the ploting is first-rate, which only
increases the depth of his description of the depraved of NYC during
the start of the Great Depression. The hidden line running through
it is what is disposable wealth and what is not, and how that
impacts moral action. The only refreshing aspect of the book
is that there is not one redeeming character in it.
The main difficulty that I had was one that I brought with me--I was picturing Elizabeth Taylor throughout as Gloria along with thinking how horribly Lawrence Harvey was miscastas Liggett in the 1959 movie.
By lazza (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)
The novel 'Butterfield 8' is nothing like its film adaptation. The book is a rather gritty account of a confused and trashy socialite who has a fling with a wealthy man which, ultimately, brings them both down. The story itself doesn't cover new ground, and the characterizations, while realistic, are not particularly engaging (or likable). However I found the realism of the dialogue and the capturing of the essence of New York City during the early Depression years to be utterly fascinating. I got far more out of it than any sort of movie during that era could deliver. For example, the entire underworld of speakeasies and how they operate is something rarely told about. But in 'Butterfield 8' the author goes into expert detail whilst combing it into the narrative.
Bottom line: forget the story, read it for the historical perspective
By K. Dain Ruprecht (Dallas, TX)
Forget the candy-colored 60's film with Elizabeth Taylor and Lawrence Harvey entirely -- this novel positively exhales the smoky, bathtub ginny black-and-white breath of the 30's. This is a gritty slice of The Depression, micro and macro, as lived by a little group of formerly comfortably well-off New Yorkers involved with an unfortunate girl named Gloria Wandrous. Too young to have been a flapper, Gloria has spent nearly every hour of her teens in speakeasies, getting drunk and sleeping with men old enough to be her father. The sad tragectory of the sexually abused is detailed here, as the 12 year old Gloria is obscurely molested by a family friend, then seduced at 15 by an ether-sniffing school teacher. The novel begins with Gloria waking in a man's apartment after having been practically raped by him the night before. Her dress is torn, and she takes a fur coat from his wife's closet to wear home. She also takes the money he leaves her (while Elizabeth Taylor proudly wrote "No Sale" in lipstick on the mirror, yeah, sure). She buys a bottle of booze to share with her friend Eddie, a former rich college boy whom she met when he was working as an elevator operator in a whorehouse. Fear of venereal disease enables him to remain "just friends" with the lovely Gloria, while the dress-render, a sour rich middle-aged serial adulterer who gets frequent check-ups from his doctor, becomes obsessed. He follows Gloria to a speakeasy, where they swap some shrug-shouldered 30's slang, get drunk, and end up in a screaming fight. Of course, it's true love. Believe me this all does not end well. It's interesting enough as a literary artifact of the times, but I found these people unpleasant and kind of stupid, in spite of the earnest breeziness John O'Hara's writing. Fran Leibowitz's foreward calls it a "guy's book" and it's true. Gloria's psychic wounds are vivid, yet the rest of her life is poorly realized. She exists as a sad example of something, not as a whole person, and that's a drag. On second thought, maybe I'd rather watch the movie.
By Larry Rochelle (North Carolina)
Of course, John O'Hara did not picture Liz Taylor in 1935 as Gloria in the Butterfield 8 movie, the wild young lady in Depression America, but certainly someone like her, intense, stylish, bosomy and oh-so-clever with men.
But, then, Gloria had been molested, and carefully taught, and O'Hara must have known a few these girls back when he was 29 and starting out with his writing, his cataloguing, of facts, steamships, cabbies, bars, bar stools and men hang-dogging around, stifled by marriage, and almost as angry as Bill Maher now, in one of his stand-up harrangues against the cages we call marriage in 2008.
And O'Hara saw it all, the dalliances, the provocative banter, the mink coats, the anger and revenge, and more.
But accidental death catches up to many, particularly those who imbibe too much, love too much, and expect a happy ending in their lives, when "whoof" it's gone totally.
But who speaks up for those wives who trap husbands so unsuitable for much, and who braves the rancid air of speakeasies to "shoosh" these erring men home to wives who sit or nap or practice their bridge games?
Who, indeed, but John O'Hara, himself coming home from a roaring drunk to insult his wife and have another drink.
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