This Side of Paradise

“Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”
-tF. 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.

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.

"I know myself...but that is all" decries Amory Blaine at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, published to literary acclaim in 1920. The book describes Amory's journey of self-realization, one in which along the way he discards love, wealth, and propriety to find his true self. He firmly believes that his personal quest has revealed what Cervantes described as "the most difficult lesson in the world," to know oneself. Alas, Amory, the self-described Romantic Egotist, indicates by the conclusion that he has become a "personage'" through his passage from youth to the wisdom he has accumulated...all by his mid-20's! Undoubtedly, Fitzgerald, who was 24 when this book first appeared, had a comparable belief in his artistic genius, but the trajectory of his own life might well have led him to express a less audacious analysis for Amory had he written this work later in his dazzling, but tragic career. Fitzgerald's young protagonist has much to tell us about introspection and heart-searching meditation, but (with apologies to the ancient Athenian reformer Solon) "count no man happy (or wise) until he his final day."

This is the tale of the idiosyncratic life of a hansome and bright Amory Blaine born to a rich (but distant and diffident) father and a sophisticated and thoroughly modern mother. He struggles with dying social conventions, changing mores, and a new political values (particularly, after World War I), but despite his efforts to conform even at Princeton, he must seek his own course. Along the way, he encounters friendship, love, and even intellectual-spiritual guidance from a variety of individuals. With the trademark Fitzgerald touch many of the character names are whimsical comments on personalities or clever bows to literary predecesors (for example, at least three of the women possess names of strong-willed characters in Shakespearean comedies). What is more impressive about this first novel is its experiemental use of a mixture of styles, which includes a stream-of-consciouness section (thus predating the more prodigious works of Joyce, Woolf, and others), and the inclusion of both verse and dramatic stage dialogue (the later reminiscent of Noel Coward). Moreover, there are some of those spectacular ands variegated descriptions that Fitzgerald was later to master in THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT. Last, but not least, this work deals with themes of importance beyond Amory's self-actualization; it provides a sublime insight into the changing image of America in a post-World War I world.

All of the above element are praiseworthy and it seem churlish to state that in reading this volume nearly a century later one admires the incipient talent, but does not always relish the result. I have already suggested that Amory's ultimate epiphany seems to me to be a rather bold assumption. More significantly, the book's loose form often demonstrates the author's inexperience in structuring a novel; it is more a montage of scenes that seem to incorporate some of his earlier writings. In addition, the book's two perspectives--Amory's and the omniscient author's-- seem inconsistent and occasionally jarring to read. Some sections are even inflated (such as those at Princeton) in contrast to the brief commentaries on Amory's military life or working career. The balance is missing because Fitzgerald as a young man (genius though he was) was writing what he knew...and university life certainly seemed a predominant feature of his early years. This indeed is a book that deserves our respectful admiration but not our undying love.

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.

It's true what they say: the first novel always ends up being partly autobiographical, whether intentionally or not. This Side of Paradise is quintessential Fitzgerald, plain and simple. The novel oozes with easily recognizable youthful charm, rich poetic style, and warm nostalgic spirit - all in all, an absolute pleasure to read, which did put a big smile on my face more than once. Highly recommended.

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“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.”

Young Fitzgerald. This is literally the most narcissistic, self involved, preening novel I have ever read. It takes the cake. And that is saying a long among the egos of the authors I've made my way through. However. It is Fitzgerald doing the preening, and he has some reason for it. The writing experiments are very interesting, and they do make you look at the story a different way each time they shift. The prose is beautiful, though out of control and all over the place. I think that's part of the charm of the chaos of this novel and Fitz's personality, but it drove me crazy sometimes, so I can only imagine what it would do to others. As a result of that, the storytelling is also very loose and wandering. Nowhere near as tight as Gatsby, and not even approaching Tender is the Night. I have a personal bias towards reading the early works of geniuses, before they created their masterpieces. And even among that set, I find this one of the nearest and dearest to my heart.

I knew this was Fitzgerald’s first novel and written at age 23, but I still expected more.

I didn’t care much about the main character and what happened to him and his narcissism was just unbearable at points. In the beginning I was following the plot and dialogues with interest, but then it got annoying with all the poetry Fitzgerald wrote and attributed to his characters. Also, all the malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs were irritating. And the female characters (AKA flippers)? A bunch of shallow girls looking for attention and money.

I understand that in 1920 this book was considered experimental and new, but it is definitely not a classic everyone needs to read. Many better books out there.

I love that Fitzgerald started this novel when he was twenty-one years old and a Princeton dropout, for he had spent most of his time writing and avoiding college work. I enjoy knowing that he was as much a maverick as his characters have been. This novel certainly is a resounding response to the shifting social consciousness of that time, with an "identifiable youth culture" claiming its place within literature and the post-war women workforce showcased as economically and socially independent. The proper "Victorian maid" was now applying makeup in public, wearing short skirts, buying her own drinks, and one could always count on Fitzgerald to subtly note these social changes in his novel.

Fitzgerald has a flair for words and it resonates in this novel. The writing is more supple than I found in
The Beautiful and the Damned  even if characterization still remains a problem for this reader. Amory's relationship to his mother was a lure initially, as the story seemed to have this D.H. Lawrence sort of texture. Yet Amory's reactions to many events wasn't very motivating. The ambitious structure of the novel was also a distraction but the way in which Fitzgerald writes about wealth is in most instances unparalleled. When writing about rich people galavanting ceremoniously, the underpinnings are the immense fear of poverty, maybe even fear of people living in poverty, fear of ever becoming poor so that power is wielded to do damning things. In any case, Gatsby remains my favorite Fitzgerald novel.