This Side of Paradise

Matt

Rating: really liked it
“Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Reading The Great Gatsby was an important experience for me, coming as it did at a time when my love for reading was threatening to lapse. Having loved books from a very young age, high school English proved a bucket of cold water for my ardor. It wasn’t that I struggled. Quite the opposite, as I did extremely well with very little effort (the obverse being true in physics). Rather, it was a matter of taking something fun and making it into a chore. Instead of being a leisurely activity, reading became something I had to do within a given timeframe. More than that, the sensation of being forced to get something out of a book – to find the themes, the symbols, the meaning in the text, as though it were as objective an exercise as a “find the hidden objects” game in Highlights magazine – took away all the joy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby kept alive that flicker of love – just barely – long enough to get me into early adulthood, when I could once again read for the pleasure of reading.

Why The Great Gatsby?

Of all the assigned reading I’ve ever done, I found it the most accessible, the smoothest, and the most entertaining. Unlike The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, who baffled me then and now, I understood Jay Gatsby’s desire to impress a girl. After all, I was in high school, and fruitless attempts to impress others took up most of my day. Sure, I was forced to write an essay on the symbolism, but that was easy, because the symbols were all right there, like shells on the beach at low tide, easy to find and pick up. But it wasn’t just the simplicity, it was the beauty. When Nick Carraway imagined the brooding Gatsby pondering the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, I could imagine it too, as clearly as anything in the world.

This is all a rather long way of saying that I was bound to be disappointed when I circled back from Gatsby to Fitzgerald’s first novel: the somewhat-weird, mildly annoying, ultimately worthwhile This Side of Paradise.

This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, a young boy who comes from a family with money and a good name. We meet Amory in preparatory school, follow him to Princeton, and eventually leave Amory adrift and searching. During this interim, Amory falls in and out of love, avoids combat in World War I, and carries on a series of dialogues – both internal and external – that has come to encapsulate a generation, even though it really only applies to a narrow cohort of white, privileged, upper class Ivy-leaguers with names like Amory.

Fitzgerald’s novel is semiautobiographical, weaving events and locations – St. Paul, Minnesota; Princeton; a lousy, heart-breaking breakup – into his fictionalized tale. If Amory is meant to be a stand-in for Fitzgerald, it is a relatively scathing self-portrait. Amory is a mostly-unlikeable protagonist: self-absorbed, overly-confident, thin-skinned, aimless and lazy.

Unlike the straightforward Gatsby, This Side of Paradise is constructed of three separate acts: two “books” separated by an “interlude.”

The first book, titled “The Romantic Egotist,” covers Amory’s matriculation. It is written in the third-person, from Amory’s point of view. Most of the time is spent at Princeton, where Amory is convinced that he has a bright future – and is equally convinced that he shouldn’t have to work for it.

I found the first book to be a bit of a chore, as Amory is a striking exhibit of undeserved privilege. He is fickle and prickly and generally unpleasant to spend time with. The peripheral characters, including Monsignor Darcy, with whom he exchanges letters, and Thomas Park D’Invilliers, a student and would-be poet, are thinly drawn at best. Certainly, none of Fitzgerald’s supporting cast leaves an impression as vivid as Tom Buchanan, with his “cruel body” clad in “effeminate” riding clothes.

(Since I clearly cannot get off the subject of Gatsby, I will note that the fictional D’Invilliers gave Gatsby its famous epigraph: “Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her…”).

The “interlude” portion of the novel, dividing books one and two, briskly covers Amory’s participation in World War I, where he served as an instructor. No further information is given regarding his military stint. Thus, unlike other postwar novels – such as The Sun Also Rises – the shadow of the war does not loom overlarge. To that end, it’s worth noting that Fitzgerald himself – unlike Hemingway – never went overseas.

The second book, titled “The Education of a Personage,” begins with a chapter written as a play, with stage directions and dialogue. No reason is given for this temporary shift in narrative style, but it works, despite desperately calling attention to itself. Here we learn about Amory’s courtship and love affair with a debutante named Rosalind (standing in for Zelda Sayre). The ebb and flow of this relationship, delineated by conversation, comes close to making Amory into a relatable, half-sympathetic human being, and salvaging him a bit from the first book.

For long stretches, I felt captive to Amory’s pompous proclamations. His long monologues can get a bit frustrating. Every once in a while, though, Fitzgerald slipped in a little grace note. Near the end of the novel, for example, Amory is shuffling down the road when a man in a limo offers him a ride. Amory then subjects the man to a tiresome disquisition on his economic theories. As the ride ends, it turns out that Amory went to Princeton with the man’s son, who is now dead:

"I sent my son to Princeton…Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last year in France.”

“I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular friends.”

“He was – a – quite a fine boy. We were very close.”

Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons…The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work!

Mostly, though, Amory is detestable. For instance:

"I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.”

To me, This Side of Paradise is a rough first effort by an extremely talented author. There is some experimentation at work, as Fitzgerald transitions from third-person narrative to a play, while also including letters, poetry and verse. You will have to decide for yourself whether you are dazzled or distracted by this shifting structure.

(Note: this “experimentation” might simply have been Fitzgerald stitching things together, since This Side of Paradise began life as a different, unpublished work).

My paperback copy is less than three-hundred pages long. Nevertheless, This Side of Paradise felt meandering and baggy and choppily episodic. There were portions where my eyes just glazed over. But just as often, I was transported by Fitzgerald’s lyrical, beautiful prose, his ability to describe a place by putting you right there:

At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded windowpanes, and swimming around the tops of the spires and towers and battlemented walls…

The Roaring Twenties live on in American imagination, at least as calculated by the number of Roaring Twenties parties I’ve attended in my life. This Side of Paradise fuels that flame. In retrospect, it has been credited – according to Professor Sharon Carson, who wrote the introduction to my copy – with establishing “the image of seemingly carefree, party-mad young men and women out to create a new morality for a new, postwar America.”

In reality, This Side of Paradise tells the story of only a thin tranche of America’s population. Those who were moneyed. Those who were white. Those who were living fast and high during Coolidge’s laissez-faire administration, unknowingly rushing towards their economic doom. Lost – or rather, ignored, completely – is any hint of a world beyond the elite. There are no minorities. There are no wage-earners. There is no indication that anyone from this time period got through life without an emotionally-jarring relationship with a flapper.

Because of the confluence of author, setting, and historical moment, This Side of Paradise will live forever. As for me, I started to forget about it right away.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1920. Taking its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post–World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status seeking.

Fitzgerald's first novel, was an immediate, spectacular success and established his literary reputation. Perhaps the definitive novel of that Lost Generation, it tells the story of Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy Princeton student who halfheartedly involves himself in literary cults, liberal student activities, and a series of empty flirtations with young women. When he finally does fall truly in love, however, the young woman rejects him for another.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و دوم ماه نوامبر سال2011میلادی

عنوان: این سوی بهشت؛ اثر: فرانسیس اسکات فیتزجرالد؛ مترجم: سهیل سمی؛ تهران، ققنوس، سال1389، در376ص، ادبیات جهان101، رمان86، شابک9789643118976، موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

در سی سالگی، «ایمری (آموری) بلین»، با ثروتی که با مرگ دو برادر بزرگ‌ترش، به او می‌رسد، احساس می‌کند دنیا مال اوست؛ پدرش «استیفن بلین» مردی نالایق، که به اشعار «لرد بایرون»، شاعر «انگلیسی» علاقه‌ ی بسیاری داشت، تزلزل، و دودلی ویژه ای برای پسرش، به ارث گذاشت، که او را انسانی سست عنصر، با صورتیکه نصفش پشت موهای ابریشمی و عاری از حیاتش، محو شده بود، نشان می‌داد؛ «این سوی بهشت» داستان زندگی پسرکی است، که تا پیش از ده سالگی، مادرش به او آموزش‌های فراوان داد؛ او در یازده سالگی می‌توانست روان، و راحت، یا شاید با لحنی یادآور «برامس»، «موتسارت»، و «بتهوون»، حرف بزند؛ پسری که به گمان مادرش، واقعا با فرهنگ و جذاب بود، و در عین حال خیلی ظریف، با زندگی در خانه‌ ای که همیشه تشریفات ویژه ی خودش را داشت؛ ...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 17/03/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 29/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Always Pouting

Rating: really liked it
I wanted to like this book because it has all the trappings of books I tend to enjoy, including gradual disillusionment with life and a character who I relate to, i.e. bad work ethic and excessive emotional reactions. I think the issue is I can't stand when people are condescending or care about status and so it made it hard for me to like the character. On top of that I wasn't quite sure what the plot or purpose of the book was. There was a lot of random poetry included in between the prose and I didn't think the poetry was good to be quite honest. The book just felt meandering, the main character was unlikeable, none of the other characters were developed in any meaningful way and so I didn't really like this one. I liked this even less than The Great Gatsby. Mostly I just felt bored.

Jason Koivu

Rating: really liked it
Entitlement courses through every word and hemorrhages forth with a youthful flair for dramatics. That a momentary blemish can nearly bring a girl to tears of despair, that looking into the very face of death wrangles only a moment's serious reflection before thoughts are turned back to the senior prom - these scenes seem too fantastical to believe. And yet, I am angered by them. I loath these characters' nonchalance about life and lives. If they were not authored into existence with such undeniable skill, I would not have wanted to charge into this book and wring their necks. This Side of Paradise is a triumph of decadence unveiled.

Jim Fonseca

Rating: really liked it
[Revised, shelves and pictures added, spoilers hidden 7/24/2022]

This was Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was 23. So it’s a coming-of-age novel and semi-autobiographical.



Our main character, Amory, is presented to us as a not-very-likable egotistical young god. “…he wondered how people could fail to notice he was a boy marked for glory…” He’s so “remarkable looking” that a middle-aged woman turns around in the theater to tell him so. He’s the football quarterback but hey, who cares, he gives that up. We are told older boys usually detested him.

He’s a big hit with the girls but he’s disgusted by his first kiss. There’s a lot of chasing of girls, drinking, partying, driving fast cars and a tragedy. The blurbs tell us that some young women used the book as a manual for how to be a jazz-age flapper – this in the 1920s. We even get a bit of goth when we are told that with one girl “evil crept close to him.”

The book is dense with themes, the main one being wealthy young men in an ivy-league environment – Princeton, where Fitzgerald went. So there’s a lot about college life and the competition among young men. We read of endless hours over coffee BS-ing about philosophy and their ‘rushing’ to get into the ‘right’ clubs.

There are a lot of excerpts of poetry he was reading and writing and one-sentence judgments about the classics they had to read in those days. And a bit about writing: “…I get distracted when I start to write stories – get afraid I’m doing it instead of living…”

Hanging over all these young men is not just the usual ‘what am I going to do with my life,’ but first, waiting to survive being drafted into World War I. Our main character is conscious of the changing of the generations and their different values: The Victorians are dying out and the WW I generation is in. They are playing with socialism.

He’s prescient when he tells us “Modern life changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before…” It sounds as if he’s talking about the age of the internet.

By the end of the book (view spoiler)[he is world-weary, rejected by a woman, fighting a bout of alcoholism. Disillusioned, he turns against books, women and faith. He has no family left. He is amazingly blasé in how he shrugs off the deaths of his father, then his mother, and finally a monsignor who was a mentor and confidant. (hide spoiler)]

At one point Amory tells us “I detest poor people” because he saw “only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity.” Was he a Democrat or a Republican? LOL.



Almost noir and a good book. You can see Fitzgerald’s emerging genius.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles, while reading Paradise. There were many similarities. Rich young men coming of age (at a prep school instead of university) while a war goes on (WW II instead of WW I) with the draft hanging over them.

Top photo of Princeton in 1915 from princetonarchives.tumblr.com
The author (1896-1940) from thefamouspeople.com

Baba

Rating: really liked it
Amory Blaine, a mid-Westerner and middle class, begin what feels like the start of the rest of his life, in the place he feels he is meant to be, and on his arrival at Princeton (university) he feels at his life's greatest moment. This is his story, via a mix of narrators, styles, even genres, the story of his painful intellectual and sexual awakening as part of the 'Jazz Age' in the shadows of and after the Great War (World War I), as America begins to find itself moving to Superpower status, whilst it's young as ever question the empowered way of life, and in this case the superpowered to be way of life.

Fitzgerald's quasi autobiographical bildungsroman debut novel is everything: showing the genius to come; showing the failings that would impede his future success; overall thematically looking at America at it's perceived best, and realised worst; dysfunctional romantic liaisons; and at its heart a quest for identity. Loathed by some critics (even now), but loved by readers at the time (his best seller in his lifetime!!!!), this starts with a strong erudite man-on-campus feel that evolves into a lot more. The first Fitzgerald read that I've enjoyed that may now lead me to rereading and reading his other works. Worth reading alone for the final chapters when Amory throws contrary opinions at the monied classes in such a delightful way, with arguments that could still be used today! 7 out of 12.

2022 read

Jess the Shelf-Declared Bibliophile

Rating: really liked it
Bleh, I tried. I tried SO HARD to like this book! I ended up skimming the last 1/3 or so of it. I love Fitzgerald’s other work, but this first book he wrote was so blasé, with no real plot or emotional connections. It was quite vapid and selfish. It reminded me of A Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye, neither of which I enjoyed. Life is too short for boring books! On to better reading.

Jared Logan

Rating: really liked it
The Great Gatsby is colossal. It's one of those books from your high school reading list that you probably still like. I do. I love Gatsby. When I saw the Baz Luhrman movie was coming out I remembered that I once promised myself I would read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. This Side of Paradise is his first novel, published in 1920.

It's not a good book, but it's a sincere book. It's an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink book. You can tell young F. Scott Fitzgerald put EVERYTHING HE HAD into this book. His life, his loves, his poetry, every idea, every experience--he crammed it all in here and called it a novel. A lot of it doesn't fit together. Not all of it is interesting. Some of it is truly puzzling. The saving grace is that behind it all there's this exuberance and passion that keeps you turning the pages.

There's not much plot to speak of. At first you're reading a bildungsroman, the story of a young american, Amory Blaine, coming of age at Princeton University. Then the story seems to focus on his love life and becomes very episodic, with touches that show you this is a very autobiographical book. The last third of the book gets...experimental. Part of it is written as a one-act play. One brief section is stream-of-consciousness (the introduction says Fitzgerald was inspired by Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man). Then there are the poems. Loads and loads of poems. Some of them are just sort of hanging there in the middle of the chapter, without a lot of context as to what they're doing there. Oh, and there are reading lists of the hip authors Amory and his friends are reading at Princeton. Huge swaths of the novel are just discussions between Amory and his classmates about literature.

So, yeah, all the freshman mistakes are here. I can tell F. Scott Fitzgerald is a first-time novelist here because he makes the mistake new comedians make. They do stand-up comedy ABOUT stand-up comedy. Here, Fitzgerald is writing about writing before he knows how to write.

He's still more brilliant than you or I will ever be. Each section, by itself, is obviously the work of a very precocious young genius in the offing. They don't make a novel when you glue them all together, but taken a piece at a time there's a lot of fascinating stuff here. I particularly liked the section where Amory Blaine meets the devil. And some of the Princeton bits reminded me so much of my own college experience, how your mind develops and your ideas change during that time.

But what I take away is how ON FIRE Fitzgerald was to write, to get it all down, to get it all out there. That excitement is there in every line. That's the lesson of the book and it's a good one.

Oh, and I also take away that 'Amory Blaine' is a terrible name for a character.

Glenn Sumi

Rating: really liked it
An Apprentice Work, With Flashes Of Genius



This Side Of Paradise was Fitzgerald’s first novel, the one that made him, at age 23, a literary star, the unofficial chronicler of the flapper era. It was such a success that his ex-girlfriend, Zelda Sayre, agreed to marry him. And we know how that turned out.

Autobiographical protagonist Amory Blaine is insufferably narcissistic and egotistical. Fitzgerald was clearly aware of this, and there’s more than a bit of satire to his portrait of the vain golden boy; he titled an earlier version The Romantic Egotist. Structurally, the book is all over the place, a collection of vignettes, impressions, poems… there’s even something resembling a one-act play near the end. WWI is oddly glossed over in an interlude.

It’s a coming of age novel with an experimental feel; at one point Fitzgerald refers to Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, and you can sense its influence, especially in the second half.

The book covers Amory’s comfortable midwest childhood, his Princeton years and the restless post-war Jazz Age generation. Throughout there’s the search for all those things you rhapsodize about when you’re very young: love, beauty, spirituality, fulfillment. The narrator occasionally drones on, telling us stuff, like some pedantic teaching assistant outlining a course.

But while the book is clearly, at times painfully, an apprentice work, it shows a ton of potential; you can see why legendary editor Maxwell Perkins agreed to publish it, despite the protests of his less enthusiastic colleagues at Scribner’s.

The book has an undeniable vitality, a spark of originality and the occasional flash of genius. You feel that Fitzgerald is attempting to capture his generation, one unshackling itself from pre-war mores. What it needs is a Nick Carraway figure, an outsider among the privileged to comment on the action. Amory is living in the eye of his own dramatic hurricane, and it’s hard to get a balanced point of view.

What’s eerie, though, is how many prescient passages there are. Like this one:

“Amory, you’re young. I’m young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you.”

Indeed he does.

Also included is one post-breakup bender that foreshadows the author’s later alcoholism. An elegiac feeling suffuses the book, especially near the end. When Amory revisits Princeton after the war, full of early disillusion, Fitzgerald gives us this stunning passage.

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light – and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights, destined finally to go out into the dirty grey turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all God’s dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…

Fitzgerald's obvious lyrical gift is on display, but there’s also a knowledge of the currents and rhythms of life that, even at so young an age, he intuitively grasped.

In short: there’s real artistry.

emma

Rating: really liked it
here is my original short review of this book from a hundred years ago (both when it was published and when i wrote about it):

"i read it in pieces during the summer, and it was good brain food in the middle of wispy beach fiction."

i used to actually, like, try at this. there was a time when i didn't just crack weird jokes and talk about myself.

weird.

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

David Fleming

Rating: really liked it
So how is it that this novel, despite it’s shortcomings, was still able to be successful? Ask any New York agent to represent your literary novel with a male protagonist and he'll tell you: “Literary novel’s with a male protagonist are hard sells.” And they are. Think about it: How many literary novels with male protagonists have you enjoyed in the last, say, five years? Probably zero. The key to the success of This Side of Paradise is in Fitzgerald’s mastery of the Male Protagonist in a Literary Novel Problem. But why should this even be a problem at all? It’s my belief that males generally don’t relate to one and other. They dominate each other. The question of ‘do you respect a full grown man?’ really comes down to: ‘is he dominate in some way?’

In a literary novel, a male protagonist is essentially going after the status quo. He’s saying that the society in which you live needs to change. We’re not apt to give credence to a full grown male who thinks things should change and yet is not in a powerful situation. We’ll assume it’s sour grapes. So, in a literary novel, a male lead must be powerful enough to have an unbiased view of the problem he sees with society. The difficulty is that powerful, dominant men generally don’t tend to be sensitive and open-minded enough to appreciate a societal problem. What’s needed in a literary male protagonist is a delicate balance of sensitivity and strength that we don’t normally see in the real world.

Many a would-be author will pen a male protagonist who just isn’t strong enough for us to feel sympathy for him. And striking this balance, or countermining this principle, has been the secret struggle of many a literary author. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a whinny, emotional punk… but he was the king of Denmark; T.S. Garp was a famous author; most all of Hemingway's male leads were war veterans or soldiers or, in the case of The Old Man and the Sea, handicapped with age. Other ways to get around the unsympathetic male protagonist is with youth, ie, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, or insanity, (see: Hamlet, yet again), Lolita, Moby Dick (Captain Ahab) and Slaughter House Five.

The average, weak and sensitive male is to be avoided at all costs by the would-be author of literary fiction. History shows us that it is only kind to those that follow this principle and This Side of Paradise is no exception. Where Fitzgerald succeeds is with his execution of what I’ll call the Snob Narrator (something that he wasted no time in establishing in The Great Gatsby). Armory Blaine is sensitive and weak in many ways—for example his vanity—but since he is a Princeton student and literary scholar, we know he also has dominance. It’s this balance of sensitivity and strength (much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that convince us through the 268 pages of this novel until the very end that Armory Blaine might have the solution to what is wrong with society. SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t. Fun read though. And very inventive.

Lorna

Rating: really liked it
This Side of Paradise was the debut and coming-of-age novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that heralded a new and dynamic author into writing about the gilded age and the emerging jazz age in 1920. This novel is purported to be semi-autobiographical, and at times not a very flattering portrait. And at times the book seems disjointed as Fitzgerald experiments with different structures in the novel resulting in long passages of poetry and prose focusing on socialism, religion and relationships. Amory Blaine is a privileged young man but struggling to find his core. He attended a preparatory school in Minnesota and then went to Princeton. But in his early life, what it so endearing is his relationship with his neurotic mother whom he calls Beatrice, and the beautiful and emerging relationship with Monsignor Darcy. It becomes clear that the Monsignor regarded him as a son and some of the best parts of this novel are the meetings and letters between them. One of the most beautiful passages:

"They slipped into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

And the essence of this novel is very much a romantic tale, but we see F. Scott Fitzgerald's instinct for the tragic view of life as we follow Amory Blaine through his years at Princeton and beyond. After all, we are looking at lives in the aftermath of World War I. I loved this book and all of the promise that this young author at the age of 23-years of age brought forth. F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliance is apparent within these pages.

One of the most poignant moments in this book and my favorite is with Amory Blaine at loose ends and trying to find himself as he is pondering social class issues in American society and where he fits. As he is walking back to Princeton and feeling driven that that is what he must do, he is given a ride by a limousine driver. It is in this riveting conversation between these men that we learn so much, not only about Amory Blaine, but about ourselves and our beliefs.

"I sent my son to Princeton,"
"Did you?"
"Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last year in France."
"I knew him very well. In fact he was one of my particular friends."

Oriana

Rating: really liked it
after reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory — sometimes they just don't live up. I mean, there's really no reason I shouldn't have loved this book. It's filled with philosophical musings and snappy, flirty dialogue; it's pleasantly disjointed, very slice-of-life-y; it's definitely full of verve and probably powerful ideas.... but I just couldn't get into it. I was in fact very impatient throughout. I found Amory Blaine to be a bit of a narcissistic bore, all the female characters thoroughly self-obsessed and false, and most of the other characters either inconsistent, un-memorable, or not believable.

I nearly always feel guilty about not liking a book. In this case my guilt is compounded by the fact that someone who once meant a great deal to me loved the shit out of Fitzgerald, and this book in particular; in fact, it's his copy, full of his underlinings and nearly destroyed due to the number of times it's been caught in in rainstorms, that I still have.

But Nick, I'm sorry. F. Scott, I'm sorry. I just don't love this like I used to.

Maxwell

Rating: really liked it
DNFing this one. Maybe it's because I'm not in the mood, or maybe it's just slow and not my jam in general. Either way, just thinking about picking this book up was not inspiring me to read so I'm done.

Lee Klein

Rating: really liked it
Of all the writing by writers in their early 20s I've read (and written), this book is down the street and around the corner from most. I wish I'd read about the Romantic Egotist before I wrote a book called Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World that also takes place in the Princeton area. (I loved when Amory Blaine biked at night with a friend from P'ton to my hometown.) Fitzgerald writes sharp, swervy, gorgeous, clever sentences, pretty much always with his eyes on the socio-existential prize. Also, really funny: 30 LOLs, at least. Self-consciously episodic in structure, with a conventional, linear, there-and-back again, rising arc (NOT lacking structure, as so many muffinheads on here say; the plot is propelled by Amory's thoughts about his emotional/intellectual progression more than old-fashioned conflict/resolution). Also, I think he's conscious of most of the things people on here level at him re: class -- he seems to me more often critical than complicit (eg, the end of his relationship with Rosalind, not to mention the final rant in the car). It's a lot like Tolstoy's Confession, but here the Egotist steps into the labyrinth of the rest of his life and realizes he knows himself and nothing else. Looking forward to the other F. Scott novels and then re-re-re-reading Gatsby.