BUtterfield 8 by John O'Hara (1935)

Whoa, was this depressing. O'Hara takes a naturalistic look at the Depression and Prohibition-era speakeasy culture of New York City. His protagonist, Gloria Wandrous, is an habitual drunk and sleep-around party girl with a history of childhood sexual abuse. The story begins when she wakes up in despair in the bedroom of a man she picked up in a bar the night before, and ends in her gruesome death when she falls or jumps from a pleasure boat and is mangled by the paddle wheels.

The above is really not a story spoiler, because both the introduction to the novel and the back cover blurb tell the reader that O'Hara based his main character on the known history of an actual woman named Starr Faithfull, who in 1931 was found washed up on Long Beach, Long Island. Even if this were not the case and a reader had no idea at the beginning how the book was going to end, it would soon become all too apparent that Gloria's story could only end unhappily. A cloud of doom and gloom hangs over all from beginning to end.

O'Hara's writing style is unattractive, yet powerful in its own way, with short, declarative sentences. Much of the story is carried by the dialogue, which is ultra-realistic, as if actual conversations were recorded verbatim. Unfortunately, real-life conversations are filled with non--sequitur and repetition and digression, which become tedious when read rather than heard.

John O'Hara was an extremely popular writer in the 1930s, but he is no longer read very much, unlike his more famous contemporaries Fitzgerald and Hemingway. His most lauded novel, Appointment in Samarra (reviewed March, 2011), also features a doomed character. I realize that his era was probably the most discouraging this country has ever faced and hope was hard to come by, but still....