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)
BUtterfield 8 – the camel-case title references retired telephone exchanges – is O’Hara’s ‘ripped from the headlines’ novel. A real murder inspired the novel. Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous earned her her first Oscar in 1960 for the 1935 novel adapted to the big screen. The novel is provocative: it details up-town and downtown adultery with cross-town machinations. Fate hinges on a telephone number and a mink coat. The novel uses the word ‘slut,’ which should remind readers that their grandparent’s era was not so innocent or halcyon.Fran Leibowitz presents some cultural signposts in her preface to BUtterfield 8. 1935 America roiled in the grinding despair of the Depression, but the one factoid that I think is crucial to understanding O’Hara’s novel is the 13 years of Prohibition, which ended in 1933. Leibowitz sees Prohibition as “oddly democratizing” on sexual mores. O’Hara, in a word, applied the stethoscope to America’s “animal impulse(s).” The opening scene is a girl waking up in a married man’s apartment. The rest of the novel is a downward slide.O'Hara might be, to some readers, a time capsule of Americana, because of all the dialog but – and I say, but – the overhead conversations, the heated resentment between schlep and boss, no matter how wrong or misunderstood, are still alive. O’Hara was famous for sitting down and cranking out a story during the lunch hour. O’Hara could have written any of the scenes in Mad Men because he understood the civility above and below the line of social propriety. William James and Tennessee Williams come to mind. O’Hara can calibrate the register of speech. In a few cut-and-polished phrases John O’Hara created real characters. More to his credit, he, for a man of his generation, imbues women with all kinds of appetites. I think that this is a neglected and overlooked accomplishment in his writing. He wrote about sex in candid but pointed terms. Readers can decide whether or not O’Hara was prescient about his critique of the so-called American Dream. I read his Appointment in Samarra as an answer to The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby’s fate is tied to an automobile and the same can be said to numerous characters in O’Hara’s novel. The automobile is ubiquitous and symbolizes the capricious, almost Darwinian selection of success and failure in American life. John O’Hara died in Princeton, bellicose to the end. The Nobel Prize was never to be his. He had striven to present the elevated and universal condition, a seeming prerequisite of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and had believed that he had done just that. The Committee might not have seen that, but there is no denying that he did capture the pulse of privileged and not so privileged America.“An Irishman’s revenge on Protestants who had snubbed him” is how John Updike characterized O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, considered O’Hara’s masterpiece. Updike writes from the position of O’Hara’s better, and he knew that O’Hara was writing against him.
Do You like book BUtterfield 8 (2003)?
BUtterfield 8 is the story of a prostitute. Gloria Wanderous has above-average looks and a way about her that charms the many men in her life. "It could be said that she was a person who in various ways-- some of them peculiar-- had the ability to help other people, but lacked the ability to help herself." After a night with an older married man, she takes revenge for his ripping her dress by stealing his wife's fur coat on her way out the door in the morning. This starts an obsession on his part. This novel is about much more than just the relationship between two people though and says a lot about society on the whole post-crash. It encapsulates an era, and though it is relatively short and easy to read, it is not always exciting. The film version starring Elizabeth Taylor won her an Oscar but the ending of the novel is quite different and worth checking out.
—Samantha Glasser
John O'Hara's Gloria Wandrous -- immortalized in the movie version by Elizabeth Taylor -- stands beside Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly in the rich history of detached women who wear their sex on their sleeves and draw a legion of male admirers, among them the wealthy (who want them for mistresses), the artistic (who chronicle them), and the queer (who admire their style and brazenness). O'Hara's book is a dapper slice of life in upper-crust Manhattan circles affected but not quite driven under by the Great Depression. As other reviewers have noted, the book has at least two major flaws (to the eyes of readers seventy-five years later): first, its casual misogyny and racism, neither of which can be fully pardoned by saying the book is merely a product of its time; and second, its conclusion. The conclusion -- which I don't want to spoil for you -- isn't abrupt so much as incomplete. I found the book's first chapters, which spiral through loosely related characters like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or just about any film by Robert Altman, hugely compelling. Chapter 5, for example, opens with a magnificent paragraph that chronicles the events that day in the lives of famous Americans, like President Herbert Hoover, and others, some of them likely drawn from newspapers, others likely invented by O'Hara, and finally the characters of BUtterfield 8. It is an epic paragraph. The author, however, eventually (and unwisely) zooms in on the rather far-fetched love between Gloria and Weston Liggett, and while it's true that Gloria is the novel's most compelling character, it's also true that readers will likely leave the book curious, too, about what becomes of Emily, Malloy, and the various others whose lives had nearly intersected with Gloria's before she boarded the City of Essex...
—Dusty
My first encounter with B8 was a scant three minutes on television. Elizabeth Taylor lolling about with her hair mussed and a drink in her hand. "It's awful," my mother said as she changed the channel. "She should have won that Oscar for Hud." To which I took away that Elizabeth Taylor movies cribbed their titles from rejected candy bar names.Four decades later, I agree that the movie is awful. And the book is awful too in all the right ways. This is a sharp and still relevant take down of class in America. The people are awful, their circumstances are awful, and the smell of the speakeasy gin wafts off the page. Even nice guy Eddie is a perfect example of why people find the term friend zone so offensive, and his decision to finally give up on Gloria and commit to a nice girl is based on such muddled, I-like-to-eat- sandwiches-that-I-like reasoning, Gloria's fate almost seems merciful.Note: Patricia Neal was in HUD and not Liz Taylor, but that's how I remember it, dang it.
—Sara
