BUtterfield 8

Summary

BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute. The novel opens as she wakes alone in the apartment of Weston Liggett, a wealthy, married, Yale-educated businessman with whom she has spent the night. Finding that he has torn her dress and left money, she takes his wife's mink coat instead and walks out. The coat sets the plot in motion. Liggett, both infatuated and anxious for his reputation, pursues her through the city. Gloria takes refuge with her friend Eddie Brunner, a struggling artist who cares for her without sleeping with her and who offers her a kind of honest friendship she rarely finds. Through flashback the novel reveals that Gloria was sexually abused as a girl by an older man and drawn early into a world of adult men, experiences that the narrative presents as shaping her restlessness and self-contempt. The novel moves among a wide cast of New Yorkers, including Liggett's wife Emily and their daughters, a newspaperman named James Malloy, speakeasy owners and society figures, using them to anatomise the city's class distinctions and double standards. Liggett's pursuit grows desperate and his marriage frays; Gloria half considers a different life. In the end, trying to get away from Liggett aboard a night steamboat, she falls overboard and is killed by the paddle wheel. The newspapers sensationalise her death, and the respectable world absorbs the scandal and moves on. O'Hara based the novel loosely on the 1931 death of Starr Faithfull, a young woman whose body was found on a Long Island beach and whose case became a tabloid sensation.

Top Lessons

• Respectability depends on whom it excludes

  The novel shows the same men moving between family life and a demimonde that society pretends not to see. It exposes how reputations are protected at the expense of women like Gloria.

• Early harm shapes later lives

  Gloria's history of abuse is presented as a hidden key to her behaviour. O'Hara asks readers to see past the scandal to a damaged person, without turning her into a case history.

• Fiction drawn from headlines

  O'Hara took a tabloid case and imagined the social world around it. The novel raises questions about how fiction uses real tragedies.

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Medical Lens

Alcohol is ubiquitous: the novel is a close portrait of Prohibition-era drinking culture, in which illicit liquor was a fashionable social lubricant and a source of chronic heavy use. Gloria's childhood sexual abuse is a hidden trauma that the narrative links to her later life; modern readers may see in this an early literary treatment of the long effects of abuse, though O'Hara's framing belongs to its time. The real Starr Faithfull case, which inspired the novel, involved disputed questions of accident or suicide; the novel itself presents Gloria's death as an accident. The period treated sexually active unmarried women in quasi-medical terms (e.g. 'nymphomania'), a framing the novel partly reproduces and partly criticises.

• Throughout

  Speakeasy drinking, hangovers and the role of alcohol in every social encounter.

• Middle section (flashback)

  Account of Gloria's sexual abuse as a girl and its aftermath.

• Final chapters

  Gloria's fall from the steamboat and the public reaction to her death.