The novel explores the life of Gloria Wandrous, a young woman having an affair with Weston Liggett, an older, married businessman. Set in New York circa 1931, it fills in her family background and sexual history, and it locates her within a circle of friends, their relationships, and economic struggles, providing a closely observed tour of "the sordid and sensational lives of people on the fringe of café society and the underworld".[4] The minor character of Jimmy Malloy, a junior newspaper reporter, serves as O'Hara’s alter ego; he has the style of a Yale University graduate but not the means.[5]

The title of the novel derives from the pattern of telephone exchange names in the United States and Canada. Until the early 1970s, telephone exchanges were indicated by two letters and commonly referred to by names instead of by numbers, with the BU represented on the telephone dial as "28," followed by four digits. In December 1930 an additional digit was appended to the exchange name. BUtterfield was an exchange that provided service to Manhattan's well-to-do Upper East Side, and BUtterfield 8 was still new when the novel was published.[5]

2.5, rounded up.

I found this rather dated. It is no longer shocking when a young girl has affairs with older men, or when they have sex promiscuously (sad fact, but true). Without the shock factor, the central character, Gloria, seemed more of a self-destructive, careless and unfeeling person than she might have seemed in 1935. She was not a character that I could make a real connection with, and none of the other characters was the least bit likeable either. I couldn’t help thinking that I was glad not to live in 1930s New York City if it was as cynical as this.

The book itself made me think of the story of The Black Dahlia, in that the girl in question, Gloria, seemed that same sort of misguided person, seeking love in all the wrong places, and wondering why she was outside the norm and not like the other girls around her. O’Hara does succeed in conveying the desperation of the times, mostly through glib conversations that seemed to me poor imitations of Fitzgerald.

O’Hara based this story on his imaginings of the life of a young girl whose body was washed up on a beach in Long Island, with no account for how she had died. It is a pretty grim story, in the way that depression era stories can be, with an overall cloud of despair seeming to wrap around the characters’ souls. I suppose I was looking for some glimmer of hope or moral fiber and found none at all. Perhaps that was intentional, after all it would take a severe lack of both to create a girl like Gloria.

I have Appointment in Samarra in line to read, and will still read in despite this not being a great book for me. Some authors write in a way that transcends their time. Based on this novel alone, I don’t think O’Hara was one of those. I think he was a man of his time, with little to say that would propel his popularity forward.
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This was my first John O'Hara book, so I was unprepared for his style -- and I'm not sure he was consistent from book to book, so I may be going out on a limb, here -- but O'Hara could be the love child of J.D.Salinger (for his ear for contemporary speech patterns) and Stephen King (for his deft mini-portraits of minor characters).

The story is sad; the book is matter-of-fact. Prostitutes live dangerous lives. New York is full of drinkers, saints, hard-drinking musicians, frat boys, and men who cheat on their wives. The Depression took a hard toll on people, good and bad.

People fall in love, sometimes with strong certainty and sometimes with doubts.
People meet with accidents. ( )

O'Hara's roman à clef follows a handful of New Yorkers and their lives, all of whom have some connection to 20-something slightly-scandalous gal-about-town, Gloria Wandrous, and it culminates in the affair she has with the older, married Weston Liggett and the aftermath of that affair.
I usually don't like this kind of novel very well; the characters are a too ordinary-everyday kind of flawed (I generally need my characters to be flawed in a more supernatural or flashy or epic kind of way, I guess) and the plot spends too much time inside their heads, and I usually get impatient with that sort of thing. But O'Hara writing is good enough that I don't mind it, I suppose, because I kind of loved this book (and I kind of loved Appointment in Samarra, too). I'm not sure that I'm supposed to like these characters - they're not exactly made up of loveable actions and motives - but I do, and maybe that's the point? Maybe that's O'Hara's special talent? Anyway, I loved it and I am beginning to think that I love him, too. ( )

I read this because I was wondering about the large scar on Eddie Fisher's face that can be seen in the movie of this novel. He didn't mention the scar in his first autobiography. There is no back story to the scar in the movie so I read this novel to see if there was one there but there isn't. As such I started reading only the passages that concerned Fisher's character, Eddie Brunner but O'Hara's observations about contemporary society are fascinating so I slowed down and started to read every page. The cause of Gloria's death is unexplained which I did not like. ( )