Total Page : 322
Publisher : Modern Library
Publication Date : 1996 07 23
>> Paradise Lost
I love F Scott Fitzgerald s Great Gatsby his almost florid romanticism and his poetic prose The first part of This Side of Paradise had me completely young glib man going to Princeton full of himself living a frivolous college life falling in and out of love I awaited the story s last part wondering how his life might turn out Instead about mid way through and with virtually no coverage of Armory s WWI duty on the front lines we are served a random lazily assembled smorgasbord of poetry memos script form dialogue long winded essays on a very young person s attempt to come to terms with the world etc etc etc Most disappointing of all is the author s failure to explore the serial failure of his love affairs a subject I wish he had addressed in far greater depth
I kept on to the end because of my interest in Fitzgerald s tragically short lived career Greatness I suppose was his with Gatsby for it is work whose substance come through in a structural maturity forming a contrast to the insubstantial characters and the shallow lives they live A preface to the Paradise I read by defender Aaron John Loeb acknowledged the book s technical errors No no we are talking strucutral errors
And still there is the soul of this author but what a wasted opportunity that he should have been allowed by his editor not Max Perkins I hope to stop working after the first 100 pages Because of its second half collapse I can only give this book two stars
David Lewis / Showbizdavid
>> The Herald Of The Jazz Age
There was a time when if I used the name of the 20th century American writer Ernest Hemingway it also almost always meant that name of the author under review F Scott Fitzgerald would follow in the next breathe and then John Dos Passos At that time I placed Hemingway s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby pretty closely together as exemplars of strong non nonsense writing styles and sparse but meaningful dialogue along with a great narrative Gatsby still certainly holds up I find though especially after re reading this Fitzgerald first effort that put his name high up on the post World War I literary scene This Side of Paradise that Hemingway has won the literary battle for the number one spot as the premier writer of that period Strangely that period The Jazz Age of the 1920s is known as such in great part due to this book and is forever associated with Fitzgerald s name
As is to be expected from a first novel this book is very great indebted to the bits and pieces of autobiographical sketches that hold it together And moreover is driven by the college exploits of the main and most developed character Amory Blaine at Fitzgerald s alma mater Princeton The long and short of the story line is a very self conscious attempt by Blaine including plenty of now seemingly obscure literary references to find out the mysteries of the meaning of life as a writer That premise does not work so well in the college milieu that dominates the first part of the book After all many college students from time immemorial from elite colleges and public universities alike has thrashed over those questions some successfully some not
What really made this book important aside from a glimpse of Jazz Age manners mores styles and ennui is the second part after college and after Blaine had done military service during World War I in France although the details of this service are only sketchily drawn World War I acted a great divide for many of the men and it was mainly men in those days who suffered through it The straight line as the story line here details from college to one s proper place in the upper echelons of society got derailed and not solely in Blaine s case This dislocation is mainly drawn out here as a spiritual crisis for Blaine but it also evoked class sexual relations almost all turning sour for one reason or another and life style This is the heart of the book and the heart of Blaine s and Fitzgerald s dilemma how to resolve the moral crisis within oneself without upsetting the social applecart that allows the wherewithal for such introspection
What does not work here and what in the end makes this an unsatisfying work is Blaine s rather vague and sudden attachment to some form of socialism near the end of the book Although revolution was in the air and the great revolutionary efforts in Europe including the seminal Bolshevik revolution in Russia were in full blast for most of the book one would not know that things like the American government driven Palmer Raids red scare the split in the left wing socialist movement in reaction to the American entry into the war and support of the Russian revolution and the establishment of the American Communist Party were taking place Blaine s socialism is of a rather diluted sort one suspects Still this is a great first effort and if for no other reason that the display of Fitzgerald s skill with language is worth reading and re reading
>> Lyrical But Flawed
Published in 1920 F Scott Fitzgerald s first novel was wildly controversial critically lauded and an instant bestseller Read today it may be difficult to understand why the story is a highly episodic bildungroman of a pampered arrogant young man as he drifts with noticeable lack of appreciation through corridors of power and pleasure without absorbing much in the way of insight But it is precisely because of that THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was felt to be such a shocker in its era the very notion that any one would write a novel about such a slacker was controversial and new Amory Blaine is among the first anti heroes of the 20th Century the opening salvo in a literary tradition that would eventually encompass everything from CATCHER IN THE RYE to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO S NEST to CATCH 22
In addition to its unexpected apathy PARADISE was also considered shocking for its portrait of women Certainly many writers including numerous female authors had written about women intelligently but Fitzgerald stands astride the shift between what was and what is A society belle of earlier generations would never admit to having been kissed before marriage the popular daughter of the 1910s was not only kissed she actively connived at it and she didn t mind talking about it afterward Fitzgerald s portraits of these seemingly new creatures who had money and social background who stayed out late and necked in strange apartments and who didn t seem to give a damn about what people of thought of them is at once tender and icy cold To say that the portrait horrified the parents of teenage girls from New York to California would be a significant understatement
At the time of its publication THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was considered an experimental novel largely because Fitzgerald shifts between several different narrative styles as the book progresses At the time it seemed very fresh and new but in truth the effect was not so much designed as accidental the novel was cobbled together from Fitzgerald s earlier unpublished writings and the contrasts and shifts that seemed fresh and new in 1920 quickly came to feel uneven afterward Fitzgerald never made the same mistake His later works would be planned written and re written and polished to an almost superhuman degree But in spite of the book s uneven narrative it is very much what we think of when we think of Fitzgerald as a writer sparks of poetry illuminating the psychology of slightly uncertain often dubious characters all interwoven with the hazards of careless wealth and incautious romance Critics of the day hailed him as a major new talent and his major works continue to stand the test of time
Like most of Fitzgerald s novels PARADISE is distinctly autobiographical in nature The novel begins with a portrait Amory as a child son of a non descript father and the fabulously wealthy wildly pretentious and ridiculously eccentric Beatrice whose influence is one of self indulgent ennui In a fit of social ambition Amory decides to depart from his mother s pseudo intellectualism and European pretensions and go to school enduring an unpleasant stint at an eastern prep school before entering Princeton But although he rejects his mother s way of life he is still very much her child he is a superficial student at best and he drifts through everything from superficial romances to philosophy class to The Great War without seeming to profit from the experience An arrogant slacker he arrives at the end of the novel to find himself without any personal resources either tangible or internal What is the point In forcing the reader to that question Fitzgerald effectively summed up the attitude of an entire generation What was it all for Why do we bother Perhaps the best any of us can hope is a little comfort here and there and a good time along the way It was an attitude that marked the beginning of the 1920s roar
The novel is particularly distinguished by a sense of irony Amory may not be a likeable person but the follies of youth most particularly its pretensions have not changed significantly over years and Fitzgerald plays them out with a dry sense of humor that makes the careful reader wince time and again Amory is indeed insufferable but so have most of us been at one time or another and the effect is comic embarrasing ridiculous and at times down right painful It is also particularly memorable as many have pointed out for its brilliant portrait of Princeton during the 1910s indeed the school becomes a major character in the novel and while Amory develops a romantic appreciation of it his great failure is that he never bothers to scratch the romantic surface in search of the core values that support it It is as Fitzgerald himself might have said the curse of the mother visited on the son a wallow in luxury without an appreciation for the hard work that supports it
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE is not really much read these days and on the occasions that is read it is usually read by those who are already fans of later Fitzgerald works such as THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT It may well be that it is best left to such I find it hard to believe that the typical reader if there is such a thing will be able to grasp what made it so unexpected in 1920 I do recommend it flawed though it is but this is really a novel that for all its beauties is probably best left to hardcore fans
GFT Amazon Reviewer
