Butterfingers

John O’Hara.  BUtterfield 8.  New York: The Modern Library.  2003 [1935].

After his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, became a hit, ex-newspaperman John O’Hara followed up with another slice of life –a young woman at odd ends early in the Great Depression.

“The 1920s in America had been a feverish time,” writes the historian Lynne Olson, “noted for government corruption and graft, a spectacular boom in the stock market, organized crime on an unprecedented scale, a widespread rebellion against convention, the loss of idealism, and an emphasis on enjoying oneself.”  That era would have suited O’Hara’s anti-heroine, Gloria Wandrous, but she was born too late.  She came of age not in the Twenties but in their grim dénouement. 

 

A youth in the early Thirties could imagine only two routes of escape – getting married and getting sauced.  Gloria is ready to throw over her down-to-earth impoverished sortof-fiancé, Eddie Brunner, for an embittered married man, Weston Liggett, who is loaded in equal parts with cash, Scotch and soda.  When she is not seducing, she is drinking, and so is he.  “I can’t think of anyone I like that has strong character and high purposes,” she tells Eddie.  “The Giants beat Brooklyn, if you’re interested.”  She thinks that she wants financial stability, but in reality she just wants escape from the future and the past.  The Depression she can’t handle.

Gloria is twin to Helen Serebryakov, the object of all male desires in Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play, Uncle Vanya.  Like Helen, she makes a fetish of listlessness.  “In the midst of all this ghastly boredom,” Helen says in a soliloquy, “where there are no real people, but just dim, gray shapes drifting round, where you hear nothing but vulgar trivialities, where no one does anything but eat, drink and sleep – he appears from time to time, so different from the others, so handsome, charming and fascinating, like a bright moon rising from the darkness.  To fall under the spell of such a man, to forget everything….” That’s Gloria’s position, too.  But Helen is bored with wealth – and Gloria, with the lack of it.  Her pursuit of the Mammon Money will cost her her life, but she thinks this a bargain.  -- Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Good reading

Anton Chekhov.  Five plays.  Oxford University Press.  2008.

Lynne Olson.  Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s fight over World War II, 1939-1941.  New York: Random House.  2013.