("BUtterfield 8" + "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold")

[fiefoe]

I had good reasons to pick up these two books, but as it turned out, I have even better reasons to put them down - here I'd like to bid a hearty adieu to emotional squalor.

At the risk of understatement, I'd say "The Spy" makes miserable bedtime reading. It was written forty years ago, when the Berlin Wall loomed large. Lest we forget, the Cold War was a war, and a brutal one.

"BUtterfield" was written in the shadow of a war as well, the war against adjectives. No wonder Hemingway liked it, seeing how he and John O'Hara must have been comrades-in-arms in it. O'Hara and his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald shared a preoccupation with class - we are always told what the characters wore and where they went to school. To me, such information is less than thrilling.

The introductions to both books (Pocket Books / The Modern Library Classics ed.) were better reads actually. John le Carre called "The Spy" the book that changed his life and put him 'on bare-knuckle terms' with his abilities. In the latter, Fran Lebowitz comments incisively about O'Hara's 'exceptional alertness to what was far from admirable in those he was so disparaged for admiring.'

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Heard on NPR: 'It's dicey no matter how you slice it.'