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Butterfield 8 by John O'Hara

Forgettable and quite honestly unpleasant 1930s-era novel about libertines in New York City. At least I hope it's forgettable, because I'd like to forget I read it. The plot and characters are nihilistic and the novel is dark. Not the kind of novel I'd recommend to brighten your day.

The story centers around a young, damaged woman who's into herself, who's both shallow and (unluckily for her) beautiful. She easily attracts men, everywhere, all the time, and her rampaging sex life even grosses her out (the book implies that she's slept with dozens and dozens of men, yet she's still in her early 20s--and remember, this is the 1930s). All the depredations, decadence and dramas she gets caught up in eventually catch up with her, but to the reader it's an empty story without even a proper ending. Imagine something like Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's with an irritating, unlikable Holly Golightly.

That said, the novel has some interesting proto-modernist structural elements: it opens with several scenelets where both the characters and the scenes themselves intersect and intertwine with each other. Also, buried in the novel there's an offhand self-reference to O'Hara's previous novel: two of the characters in Butterfield 8 look across a speakeasy and see a woman who looks just like someone from Appointment in Samara. You'd miss it entirely unless you'd just finished that other novel. These and other modernist elements make the novel seem like something written in the 1960s rather than 1935, but they don't make the novel redeemable enough to read.

Once again, you get a real taste for the libertinism of the 1920s and early 1930s, and after two John O'Hara novels in a row it certainly appears to be a pattern--but I won't be sticking around for any more of his novels to see if he can write beyond this theme.

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