So, I hadn't read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald besides The Great Gatsby and I'd been meaning to give some of his other work a try. I was in the car for a long time the other day and a copy of this book was lying on the floor so I just picked it up and started reading it. In the end ... it was just okay, in my opinion.

I think Fitzgerald writes beautifully, but I felt that this book was really lacking in terms of plot/story. I think books about day-to-day life can certainly be interesting, but in this case I couldn't bring myself to care about the protagonist. He's essentially just a conceited asshole––and he's supposed to be, as far as I can tell ... but even though conceited assholes can be interesting characters, I just wasn't invested in Amory's story. And none of the characters really interested me, for that matter. There were a lot of minor characters that just came and went and didn't seem to serve a lot of purpose.

On top of that, I found the pacing awkward; months or years would go by in the span of a paragraph or two, and a lot of it read like a summary rather than an actual story. There were also long streams of poetry and a random section written in play format, and those parts were kind of tedious to get through.

Over all, I had mixed feelings about this book. I loved the writing for the most part, and I kind of see what Fitzgerald was trying to get at, but it just didn't work for me. I still hope to try his other books, though.

I Do Hate to Be A Spoiler, but...

I must confess skim-reading “This Side Of Paradise” a couple of years back, dismissing the work as a rag bag and putting it down somewhere on Goodreads as “the first Coffee Table novel”. Before Christmas, I began delivering on a guilty self-pledge to plough through the tome word for word, and not a few weeks did pass before that mealy task was done. The verdict? It is more pastiche than rag bag, a distinction I endeavour to explain below.

Of course, the novel has to be read by all serious students of Fitzgerald's work not simply because it was the first he published; launching his career, it became the fiction sensation of 1920-1. It first took off on the back of positive reviews from a brace of friendly critics (Rascoe & Mencken) who were keen to promote Fitzgerald's distinctly Young American voice. Thereafter, it soared on chutzpah & hype; and benefiting from the coast-to-coast coverage of publishing giant Scribners almost 50,000 copies were sold in little over a year. It may be the first novel to depict the return of the US Expeditionary Force from Flanders, and by pre-dating Faulkner's “Soldier's Pay” and Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” by half a decade, it delineates the start of a literary movement of which the latter was to coin the term, “Lost Generation”.

That books sell through clever marketing is clear, but a certain amount of consumer satisfaction is also required. What appealed to 1920s readers is slightly more complex. No doubt, fascination with the lives of the rich would have kept many eyes on the page. Sex plays a major part, too. Of course, Fitzgerald was no purveyor of smut and the novel presented little that would have been worthy of any second glances by Jazz Age censors. It may therefore have benefited from the vogue for risqué without incurring any of the risks. Through a mixture of obtuseness and subtlety, Fitzgerald takes his reader from scandal-class kisses at posh house parties to the cheap hotel rooms of debauchery proscribed by the Mann - 'White Slavery' - Act of 1910. Also of topical note was the start of Prohibition in the very year of publication, which may have increased sales to the clientèle – or would-be clientèle - of the speak-easy. Most of all, though, “This Side of Paradise” is a book about young adults, written by a young adult, for young adults. It was the start of the era when law-making would begin to dog the lives of young Americans and lead, ultimately, to the revolutionary Beat Generation that came after the Second World War. Having laid that claim for it, however, it must be said that the text as a whole is not an easy read. Doubtless many copies would have fallen open at well-marked, well-read passages.

A handbag? Pastiche? Influenced by the likes of Compton MacKenzie’s “Sinister Street” and Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man”, its many passages of brittle prose are cut, for heaven's sake, with much damp poetry and windy dialogue. It's as though the contents of Zelda's diaries (the style of which Fitzgerald carefully deployed in drafts of his early novel, “The Romantic Egoist”) had been tipped out onto a large refectory table, cherry picked and then repackaged between leaves of his own stuff. Expensively produced stuff, that is. All the same, stuff. At one point our anti-hero Amory Blaine walks out of his job at a New York advertising agency complaining,

“...it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you”.

We never get to read his copy, but we are tied to the mast while Fitzgerald does impressions of Endymion The Vogon,

ttt“The shadow of a dove
Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
And down the valley through the crying trees
The body of the darker storm flies; brings
With its new air the breath of sunken seas
And slender tenuous thunder...”

Is this the writer who gave us “The Great Gatsby”? You better believe it! How did the old Iggy Pop number go? “Success/Here comes my Chinese rug”.

The main characters are clearly life-meets-literature drawn, from Blaine (an amalgam of Fitz himself with various Princeton bonhomies), his fairy godmother Ma, an actual Monsignor, a succession of débutantes (amongst which Fitz's real-life loves Zelda Sayres and Ginevra King are measured out in coffee spoons) plus lesser souls for whom the East Coast of the nineteen-teens would have been an anthem stomp for disaffected youth. It's an artificial book in as much as it's populated by artificial people. There is no plot, no ending to give away. So here's my spoiler: some die, others go on to other things.

When published in March 1920, this - Fitzgerald's first novel - was an immediate critical and popular success. It led to success for Fitzgerald in another way too, because when it was accepted for publication Zelda Sayre, who had ended her relationship with Fitzgerald the previous year, agreed to marry him. After the first print run sold out within three days of publication, Fitzgerald wired for Zelda to come to New York City to marry him that weekend. She agreed and they married a week after the novel was published. The pair then fell headlong into the life of celebrity which contributed so much to their ultimate downfall.

In some ways it's difficult to understand why this work was so well received. It has "first novel" stamped all over it. The writing is uneven in quality and patchy in tone, clearly cobbled together from pieces which don't always fit together harmoniously. Fitzgerald combines standard prose narrative, narrative in the form of a play, free verse and rather pedestrian poetry to tell the story of Amory Blaine, a young mid-Westerner who believes he will achieve extraordinary success in life. He goes to boarding school and then to university, falls in and out of love, drinks too much, tries to write, goes to war, works briefly in an advertising agency and endlessly philosophises alone and with his friends.

Amory is squarely based on Fitzgerald and much of the action is autobiographical. While what appealed to critics about the novel in 1920 was the exploration of young American manhood in the aftermath of World War I, it is the autobiographical flavour of the novel which is probably of most interest to modern readers. Fitzgerald's ego and his insecurities, his relationship with Zelda, his desire for success, the cynicism of the age are all there in the text. Amory Blaine's self-obsession is Fitzgerald's self-obsession, not the less real for being insightful. In a moment of introspection, Blaine reflects:

He knew tht he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstance and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly "No, Genius!". That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he could be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that tomorrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first class actor. He was ashamed of the fact that simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him - several girls, and a man here and there through college, that he had been an evil influence on people who had followed him here and there into mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.

Knowing that Fitzgerald did not continue to rebound unscathed from those mental adventures adds a certain poignancy to reading this novel. However, nothwithstanding the beautiful prose, the evocation of the age with which Fitzgerald has become synonymous, and the autobiographical insights, this is not a work I have any particular interest in reading again. Most of the problem with the novel is, I think, that clever young men are never quite as interesting as they think they are. Two stars for Amory's story and another one because of the insight it provides into the workings of the young Fitzgerald's mind.

I am not giving this book a rating. The reason being is that I had a hard time with the main character Amory Blaine. I tried liking the character, but he just rubbed me wrong.

Aside from not liking the main character, this was a wonderfully written story. I can see why Fitzgerald shot out of the gate with this one. And the big treat of this story is Fitzgerald’s “reading list”. Fitzgerald kept alluding to many of the books that he had read during his early years. And one of them was Robert W. Chambers. So it looks like Fitz might have been a weird fiction fan.

Give this book a go and judge the main character for yourself.

There's no denying that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a gifted writer, even in the beginning.

A lot of his problems lay in the thinly-veiled autobiographical nature of his novels.

In "This Side of Paradise," the protagonist--he certainly never does anything heroic--is Amory Blaine. Like Fitzgerald, Amory was born into a family with money, went to prep school then Princeton, drank too much, couldn't find the right woman, and briefly wrote for an ad agency.

The problem with using a bright, young man as a protagonist is that bright young men can be so infernally tedious. Amory and his friends discuss ideas and literature with wearying solipsism, as if they were the first people ever to think.

Again, much if not most of Fitzgerald's novels are autobiographical, and I usually find his work brilliant. The problem with "This Side of Paradise" is that Fitzgerald the author hadn't yet become sufficiently interesting as Fitzgerald the person. Once the alcohol, Zelda, and fame-fueled eccentricity manifested, the stories "showed" us a world apart from our own. "Paradise" does a whole lot of tedious "telling." The potential is obvious, especially if we've read Fitzgerald's later works. Sadly, this is just a long 280 pages of an intelligent boy, who loafed through college, dated a few interesting girls, had and lost a job, and spent a decade of his life telling himself, his peers, and us readers just how damn clever he is.

Honestly, what a boring book.

Poorly written in some ways. It was as if Fitzgerald couldn't decide how he wanted to portray himself as an author. Occasionally it was written in prose, then just disappeared into poetry, then meandered off into the structure of a drama.

The characters are irritating, unrealistic, and have far too high of an opinion about themselves. The final chapter has little or nothing to do with the rest of the book and reads more like a manifesto than anything else.

There was no real point to reading the book and I am not sure how it got to be regarded as a classic.

If I were to sum it up the story it would be: "Woe is me. I was born with every advantage and frittered it away and it's all your fault."

This Side of Paradise (1920) is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom I lovingly rebaptized 'Hottie Mc Scottie'. (#sorrynotsorry) The book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who tries to define his own identity within and apart from his generation, the lost generation.

As most debut novels, This Side of Paradise is highly autobiographical. It was written in the context of Scottie and Zelda's on-and-off-relationship in the summer of 1919. After less than a year of courtship, Zelda Sayre broke up with the 22-year-old Scottie. After a summer of heavydrinking he returned to St. Paul, Minnesota, where his family lived, to complete the novel, hoping that if he became a successful novelist he could win Zelda back. I think this tells us a lot about Scottie's personality - it shows us his vulnerability but also his core belief that money and success would/could change everything. It is also important to note that Scottie had in mind that Zelda would probably read this novel, and whilst I haven't found an academic text on this, I would personally argue that his portrayal of the character Rosalind, whom he, in my opinion, based off Zelda, was altered by this fact. Her portrayal is bittersweet, very manic-pixie-dream-girl-esque (...what a word) and quite favorable, meaning that she is the one girl who leaves the biggest impact on our main protagonist, his epitome of beauty.

In the fall of 1919, Scottie gave the manuscript to an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons in New York. The book was nearly rejected, but upon further editing got accepted. Scottie begged for an early publication - *coughs* because his dick was hard for Zelda - but was told that he would have to wait until the spring. Nevertheless, upon the acceptance of his novel for publicaton he went and visited Zelda, and they resumed their courtship. His success imminent, she agreed to marry him (which speaks volumes about her morality as well). I honestly can't say I am a big fan of their relationship, it seems so destructive to me, but it's definitely something that I would have to do more research on before forming a valid opinion.

Hottie Mc Scottie is known as the embodiment of the modern American writer. The age of American high modernism was one of intense self-invention, and Scottie was prominent among these in having forged a self-created image of 'the author' conveyed to life and work. Even now, decades later, we are all somewhat familiar with Gatsby, the knowledge that Scottie was a cracked-up alcoholic and dead at the age of 45.

His first novel bears many traits of the Bildungsroman, the novel of moral and pscyhological growth. This Side of Paradise is both significant in its own right as a portrait of a young man's initiation into life, the chronicle of a generation, and a as the site where Scottie founds his identity as an author. As an authorial initiation, the novel foreshadows the concerns of his major works: the quest for identity, the investigation of modern sexuality, the estimate of 'consciousness'.

Intended to typify the youth of a generation that would become 'lost' in the aftermath of World War I, Amory is in the process of revolting from the old order as he tests out philosophies that his elders would regard as radical and behaviours they would see as dissolute. The emergence of sexuality is at issue, as Amory succesively experiences and rejects various romances, among others his disastrous relationship with the debutante, Rosalind. And of course, in the age of Prohibition, he drinks. ;)

Amory's problem is one of narcissism, and his 'education' in the novel involves both the formation of a 'personage' (unity of identity) and an encounter with that which lies outsite the self. The novel is much more about the formation rather than the full composition of Amory's identity. Perhaps most important, Scottie wrote a conclusion to the novel that, in its final line, offers the possibility that the 'personage' of Amory Blaine, while still in the process of formation, has yet achieved some form of self-definiton, precisely as a process. I appreciated that notion very much, because growing up can be fucking frustrating, and I often feel the pressure that I should have reached certain milestones in my life yet, that I should have a grip on who I am and who I want to become, but that's just not the case. Life is a process, things are constantly changing.

Amory Blaine is a nomadic figure, wandering from affair to affair, book to book, in search of both a relationship and a doctrine that will give him some access to 'reality' in a time when the ground seems to be constantly shifting under him. After World War I and the collapse of the old world, a new age of uncertainty began, characterized by frantic speculation and activity. Scottie portrays adulthood as a labyrinthine world, into which Amory is on the verge of entering. In giving a voice to both Amory and the world and people around him, Scottie portrays not only Amory's coming to identity within that generation, but the generation itself.

He attempts to capture the geist of his time, to define this group of individuals at this specific period in time. In This Side of Paradise he provides a fictional representation of a war generation identified, paradoxically, by its lack of identiy, by the loss of direction and the sense that history and Western culture as they were then known were rapidly coming to an end. What the lost generation has lost - cultural identity - is linked in complex ways to the formation of a new national identity after 1918 and his own search for a form of writing that would underwrite his identity as an author.

Amory defines himself within the historical and social contexts of his generation: a middle-class Midwesterner transplanted to the aristocratic halls of Princeton (you don't know how excited I got everytime Aaron Burr was mentioned...); a boy growing to maturity during the upheaval of a world war, shuttling erratically between idealism and disillusion; a young man exploring sexuality. Yet the completion of his education and his achievement of the status of 'personage' is marked by his seperation from both his childhood and 'generational' origins as he erases the past and attempts to begin anew at the point zero of disjunct self-knowledge: 'I know myself ... but that is all.'

Similar disparities set off Fitzgerald's writing in a novel that repeatedly lists the authors and texts that persons of Amory's sensibility and generation read, as if Scottie wanted to constitute for his readers the generational canon from which he proceeds. In its portrayal of Amory Blaine seeking identity within and apart from his generation, This Side of Paradise preserves the sense conveyed in this fragment of Scottie's own awareness as an author who is both reproducing the textual past and attempting to break away from it in generating a writing that is 'modernistic'.

The novel is an uneven assemblage of anecdotes, aborted novelistic sequences, poems, one-act plays, passages from author's letters and diaries, and vairously integrated short stories and set scenes. It feels almost experimental at times, which I adored because it showed that Scottie was still trying out new things, and first and foremost trying to break with old (literary) conventions to become a true modern writer.

On the one hand, This Side of Paradise can dazzle with its brilliant writing style and the beauty of the its language, but on the other hand, it is exactly that language that makes the novel feel superficial and its dialogue artifical at times. It is incredibly hard to connect to any of the characters, or to truly feel for any of them, because everything seems incredibly fake.

I would say, I read this at the perfect time in my life, being a student myself and still struggling to find my own identity and place in this world, and therefore I highly appreciate Scottie's debut novel.

Por primera vez en su vida deseaba que la muerte se llevara a toda su generación, borrando sus mezquinas fiebres y luchas y alegrías
3,5/5
Esta fue la primera novela de Fitzgerald y no la recomiendo para empezar con el autor (mejor 'El gran Gatsby'). Creo que es un libro que se disfruta mucho más si ya has leído otras de sus novelas antes y conoces su estilo y vida... Porque una vez más, 'A este lado del paraíso' tiene mucho de relato autobiográfico, y aquí Fitzgerald libera toda la decepción y disgusto que siente ante el mundo.
La novela relata los años en la universidad de Princeton del joven Amory cuando era un joven adinerado y egocéntrico, hasta la llegada de la Primera Guerra Mundial y el cambio que supuso en la sociedad y especialmente en su generación.
Sorprendentemente la guerra no tiene una importancia real para Amory (igual que para Fitzgerald) pero sí nos muestra sus consecuencias.
Como me ha ocurrido con todas las novelas que he leído de este autor, es un libro que me ha dejado más poso del que esperaba y sus últimas 100 páginas me han gustado muchísimo por lo críticas e inconformistas que son.
Aunque durante la mayoría de la historia los personajes resultan bastante odiosos por ser unos jóvenes millonarios caraduras yo me divertí mucho con sus andanzas, e incluso en los trágicos amoríos de Amory encontré un poso de reflexión sobre la situación de la mujer, tan terriblemente limitada.
Otra cosa a destacar es la maravillosa prosa de Fitzgerald, siempre insuperable, aún en su primer escrito, y además aquí hay que añadir lo original que resulta este libro que intercala cartas, poemas e incluso un pequeño drama teatral que encaja a la perfección.
Sea como sea, no me parece una de sus grandes novelas, pero me hizo disfrutar y sorprenderme una vez más de la habilidad con las palabras de este gran autor.

This would be my last Fitzgerald book ever.
His writing style is extraordinary and magnificent but as he might have put it: he doesn’t write about anything of importance.

Brilliant dialogue that still rings true after many years of being published. One has to wonder what he would have accomplished if F Scott Fitzgerald had not died so young ?

n  ​"You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination."n

This semester I am doing a self-driven challenge: to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels (and a few short story collections if I have time). I read exactly ten pages of Fitzgerald a day, every day. This was my first read of the year and I can say that so far this idea is going well.

I read The Great Gatsby way back in middle school, but I can say this is the first of his books I have truly read. The way the author captures human emotion, both the beautiful and the ugly, is glorious and his word imagery is pretty much unparalleled. I adore the writing.

The main problem with this book was that it was so inconsistent. One minute, I was raptly devouring it, the next, rolling my eyes at yet another philosophical rant. Honestly. One page I was singing the praises of a flawless beauty with a choir belting harmonies and the next I was facepalming so aggressively my friends worried it was a form of self-mutilation. The same went for how I felt about Amory, our main man. I loved him, I hated him, I loved him, I hated him.

Overall, very much so reads like a debut novel: with struggles and promise all wrapped up in a bow.

honestly, the absolute best thing about this book is that i bought my copy when i was 14 on a stand outside of central park one rainy afternoon, after exploring the MET; it was probably one of the most magical days of my life.

fitzgerald's books are a dream (teetering on nightmares, sometimes) and they are all mine.

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on a fitzgerald reread binge for like the 30th time in my life. to absolutely no one's surprise.