- Paperback: 228 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1994 ed edition (Sep 27 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679755802
- ISBN-13: 978-0679755807
- Product Dimensions: 13.7 x 1.8 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,410,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Like Henry James, O'Hara could create a world where class and social strictures are all-important but not openly discussed."--The Village Voice.
Book Description
A bestseller when it was originally published in 1935, this is a brilliant, brutal portrait of New York's speakeasy generation.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surpirsingly Fresh After 70 Years,
By
This review is from: BUtterfield 8 (Paperback)
Sparked by the mysterious real life drowning in 1931 of a young New York woman who was later revealed to be a bit of a good time girl as well as victim of childhood sexual abuse, O'Hara's second novel remains remarkably fresh and readable, with surprising sensibilities for the time toward topics such as pedophilia and alcoholism. Of course, alcoholism is something O'Hara had first-hand experience with. A contemporary of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and an intimate of Dorothy Parker, he was a renown nasty drunk, with a penchant for three day benders. This experience serves him well in this study of Gloria Wandrous, a pretty, promiscuous woman who spends a good part of her young life trying to drink her demons away in Manhattan's Prohibition-era speakeasies. Her demons stem from being sexually abused as a child, a trauma that led to her sexual promiscuity when she is more mature (interestingly, recent studies have revealed a significant correlation between sexual abuse as a child and promiscuity later in life). Gloria is what used to be called "damaged goods"óunderneath her brittle shell and drunken pain, she is smart, kind and caring. Despite these fine qualities, she's emotionally unequipped to deal with true love and tries to run away from it, as she does from everything else. On the first page we learn that she will meet an unhappy ending, and then the story begins with Gloria waking in the apartment of her latest one-night stand and walking out with the man's wife's fur coat. This spur of the moment decision has a series of repercussions, which play out over the next few days as a whole slew of characters intersect and the threads of the simple plot are brought together. The book's main flaw is that there are far to many of these characters coming and going throughout the pages, and one needs a scorecard to keep track. This may have been a result of his playing to his strengths, which were a keen eye and the ability to quickly capture a person in a few lines. Much of this skill is directed in a strident satire of the upper classes (which he had a strange envy/hate relationship). A good deal of effort is expended in portraying their lives as either endlessly trivial or monstrously prurient. And it is significant that it is eminently respectable men who abuse Gloria in her youth. This is not a cautionary tale of a young woman corrupted by the big city, but a lament for the effects of a monstrous crime perpetrated against a child. The style is very simple and direct, which is perhaps why it remains fresh and contemporary. It is remarkably frank about sexual matters considering it was written seventy years ago by a mainstream popular writeróbeyond the simple promiscuity, group and public sex acts are described. It's not the most fascinating book, but it can definitely be recommended to those with an interest in New York City, Prohibition, or sexual abuse. There is a fair amount of ambiguity in some of the episodes, and most especially in the ending, so those who need clean resolutions are hereby warned.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A world of its own,
By Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: BUtterfield 8 (Paperback)
O'Hara, it has been said, writes like you always wish Fitzgerald had actually written. He describes much the same privileged world, but without the chocolate-box sentimentality. His characters are often moral monsters--to themselves as well as others--but they do seem real, as does the New York world of speakeasies and glamorous apartments in 1931 he describes here. His central character, Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful cosmopolitan girl living on her wits and her sex appeal, seems a clear forerunner of Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly, except she is much less madcap and much more tragic. The central action is Gloria's swiping an expensive fur coat from the closets of a married wealthy new Yorker who brought her to his apartment and tore her dress off in order to date-rape her; we are then introduced to a series of characters who will all come together through the chain of events set off by Gloria's taking of the coat. This is a hard book to put down. Though the world it describes is incredibly sordid, it feels like a place you could easily visit and recognize.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful and Memorable...a 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5,
By crazyforgems (Wellesley, MA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: BUtterfield 8 (Paperback)
I have enjoyed O'Hara in the past and I had always wanted to read this book. When I saw that Fran Leibowitz wrote the introduction, I thought "it's time."O'Hara sets the book in the early 1930's in New York City. He focuses his sharp powers of observation on the "speakeasy" class of New York: those individuals with still enough wealth to spend time in illegal bars drinking their worries away. At first, you think "ah, these are the beautiful people." Of course, soon you realize that these individuals are anything but beautiful. The heroine, or anti-heroine, Gloria, is a beautiful, young woman of loose morals and some inherited wealth. She is smart-we're told she could have gone to Smith-and underneath everything, kind. But sexual abuse early on triggered a rampant promiscuity. O'Hara specializes in delineating the subtle class differences-the Catholics who went to Yale as opposed to the Wasps-that existed at this time. He structures class systems in his novels as rigidly as any Brahmin. I would recommend this book for individuals who enjoy contemporary fiction, particularly books set in New York that depict wealthy, beautiful people. (If you like Fitzgerald, you'll like this book.) Both men and women can enjoy this book-as Fran Leibowitz says in her introduction, "it's a young man's book" in many ways. I would not recommend this book for individuals who dislike "dated" fiction (though this book is surprising fresh in many ways) or books that verge on melodrama. One note about the Leibowitz's introduction: I found it excellent. She has some acute observations-sex is an animal desire, the perception of it human and changing according to mores in vogue-that have stayed with me.
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