took me entirely too long to finish when i could’ve done it it two days. i liked some parts. there was good analysis of the transition from teenage to adult years that i could relate to, but overall i was not very engaged or impressed.

A self-indulgent steaming pile. But I wasnt a fan of Gatsby either, so......

“If being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise

Oh, Amory! This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, was so bad that Scribner declined to publish it multiple times. In fact, during the final vote, Scribner once again declined publication, and Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, said that he would essentially resign if the talent of F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t published. Only then did Scribner agree to publish.

This is a classic coming-of-age story with lots of teenage angst. Amory Blaine has tremendous potential (boarding school, Princeton) but wastes every opportunity, doing nothing but trying to amass kisses. Of the people most deserving of sympathy in the world, Amory wouldn’t even make the top 10. Or even the top 1,000.

This book is interesting for two reasons. The first is that this book is a thinly disguised autobiography for F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author went to boarding school, attended Princeton, and befriended a priest. Often times, a character’s real-life equivalent is known. For example, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is John Peale Bishop.

The second reason relates to this work’s literary influence. JD Salinger admitted that he was influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald—The Catcher in the Rye is somewhat a retelling of This Side of Paradise. And, of course, this novel is a steppingstone to The Great Gatsby. Sadly, This Side of Paradise isn’t of the same caliber as The Great Gatsby.

The tone of the book is rather depressing. Fitzgerald himself once said, “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.” He should have heeded his own advice. And the splendor and magic of this book is buried beneath excessively long paragraphs and chapters. As the book resembles an autobiography, it feels aimless and lacks a plot. The dialogue is also unnatural and bulky with characters overexplaining, and Fitzgerald uses too many adverbs (examples: Amory said sharply, he continued coldly, she said faintly, she said finally, and many more!).

Instead of professors merely holding up The Great Gatsby, and the heavens part and a beautiful beam of sunshine plays upon the cover, This Side of Paradise should be included in the curriculum, reassuring students that Fitzgerald wasn’t born with the writing chops to churn out The Great Gatsby. He started off by putting out a mediocre book that even his publisher didn’t want. But keep writing. Keep working.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Texts – Both are First Edition Library copies (FEL): $75.82 on eBay. The second FEL text comes from a set of 19 FEL books that I bought at an estate sale for $500.
Audiobook - $84.99 per year through Everand

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Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise follows Amory Blaine from childhood through to adulthood as he navigates the trials and tribulations of life.
Bit slow in parts, but I enjoyed reading about Amory. I found him particularly endearing.

Having read Fitzgerald’s early short stories first, I noticed - and found it particularly interesting - that he adapted several of his earliest short stories into parts of this novel. Most notably, Babes in the Woods, The Debutante and Spires and Gargoyles.

Too little here to like, too much here to ignore. This book comprises set-pieces in the life of a boy growing into adulthood. Amory is attracted and repulsed by his peers endlessly re-classifying them while working his way through prep-school, Princeton, and the trailings of a trust fund in New York.

Amory's internal struggles often come across as affectations-- his lack of energy and focus less a concern for Fitzgerald than his hero's attempts to define success and thereby himself. I want to believe that's the point, but I'm not sure. Here we have all the sinning without any of the repentance, which makes for a frustrating ending. Perhaps there's perspective and enlightenment in the final chapters and the contrast between down on his luck Amory and the successful older businessman foreshadows a trading of ideals for fortune. Seems a bit generous to me though.

Fitzgerald liberally sprinkles poetry and dialogs throughout. They're well written but a little awkward at times. About halfway through the book I read that Fitzgerald had expanded a book he'd previously written to create this one. Let's say it shows.

There's greatness in certain places-- the self destructive love interest, walking in the woods with his classmate, the first kiss/date as a boy. All very moving and authentic, and I'm sure also very autobiographical. What's with all school machinations and posturing? I get that it matters to the protagonist, yet it lacks impact.

Overall, this material is so commonplace in today's media that it's hard to read it with fresh eyes. I want to compare it to Coupland's Generation X, or Caufield's Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps it's the perspective of a depression and a second war that kept me from engaging fully.

I can't help feeling that if Amory spent a couple more chapters sweating his beliefs out to earn room and board I'd have left satisfied. I don't know if my lingering dissatifaction is a credit to Fitzgerald. I doubt it.

My musings on This side of Paradise:

Truthfully, I really don't know where to begin this review-of-sorts. I didn't Love this novel, not like The Great Gatsby but it is definitely a unique one. A fabulous start to a great writing career for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This was his first novel and I can definitely see why it got the acclaim it did. The journey of self discovery is an often written of thing but seldom, in my experience, from a boy/man's POV. I'm not really sure why that is. I don't believe women are naturally more reflective than men or anything asinine like that but for whatever reason male self discovery books are more rare.

I won't say I liked Amory Blaine because I didn't. He's loathsomely selfish and egotistical through much, if not all, of the novel. He sees himself chiefly through others opinions of him which is usually detrimental. His sense of the romantic is actually a bit disturbing. Also, he seems to create definitions to words or behaviors that mostly have nothing to do with them.

That being said, despite the fact that the main character frustrated me greatly I enjoyed this novel. Fitzgerald's writing causes a great deal of reflection and internal philosophical debate. Through Blaine he delves into some interesting debates that make you question the world and it's nature at large. Anyone who can do that holds high stock with me.

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.

When I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise (somewhere in my late teens or early twenties; I can't remember exactly) I was younger than the author was when he wrote it. Re-reading it fifteen-ish years later, I'm a decade older than he was when the novel was released and I'm no less astonished by his writing's brilliant force.

This book's composition beautifully emulates its content: following its protagonist, Amory Blaine, from adolescence to young adulthood, it's all about the birth of consciousness. The narrative might not be as expertly constructed as, say, The Great Gatsby or even The Beautiful and Damned / Tender is the Night, but Fitzgerald's perspective and style announces itself fully formed. His unique formal adventurousness is already on full display: the novel incorporates poems, epistolary chapters, and even a large section written as a stage play. Fitzgerald's prose—especially in the final thirty or so pages—deftly balances heightened poetic language with the kind of hyperreal clarity often attributed to his contemporary and friend Ernest Hemingway.

One of the novel's most impressive features is its convincing depiction of Blaine's gestating views on literature, religion, politics, sex, and education. I especially love the long debates between Blaine and his classmates about books they're reading and ideologies they're considering, which so persuasively echo the dialogue of very young and very self-serious intellectuals-in-training.

The story doesn't so much chart a tidy progression from "asleep" to "awake" as it watches a protagonist's faulty assumptions gradually crumble under the weight of reality. At the end of the novel, Blaine seems to have developed some kind of class consciousness, but he also recognizes his own deep resentments toward people living in poverty. He's a mass of contradictions and confusions, which makes him all the realer.

“Oh we'll have a talk tonight or perhaps tomorrow night. I want to tell you about your heart-you've probably been neglecting your heart-and you don't know."

“He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. it was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had
given nothing, he had taken nothing.”

“I’m a cynical idealist”

“Each life unfulfilled, you see,
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy.”

“and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world.”

“No- you’re wrong again, how can a person of your self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleases some sloppy old Greek sculpture, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face, I’d be a quiet nun in the convent”

“ I find the only answer to this bitter age--all the world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in that hopeless resignation.”

“There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.”

“ Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself-incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty.”

“No, I'm romantic-a sentimental person thinks things will last--a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.”

"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.”

“Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality.”

“But the truth is that sex is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that it obscures vision.”

“To begin with, he was still afraid-not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony.”

“He was his own best example -sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.”

“It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light
of the moon.”

“They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now, but they haven't any faith in these idealists.”

“He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived.”

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But-oh, Rosalind! Rosalind!..”

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

Someone needed to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald to stop writing poetry and including it in this book as the work of his characters. You have to read it, because it's freaking F. Scott Fitzgerald and you don't skim the man's work, but honestly this was insufferable.

There were passages in this book that I loved, and parts that I couldn't put down: but overall the work seemed uneven. The plot structure wasn't really there. The whole focus of the book is simply one character's development as a person from childhood to mid-twenties, and that development isn't always believable.

That said, there was a lot of playfulness in this book that made it fun to read. Midway through, you suddenly have three chapters that are written entirely in play format. Towards the end you enter Amory Blaine's head with a series of questions and answers he's asking and answering for himself, followed by a page of stream of consciousness. These deviations, while abrupt, give effective, fascinating glimpses into the characters' lives that traditional prose could not deliver.

Recommended kinda!

Just when you think this novel is going to make up its mind to go somewhere or decide to be about something, it decidedly doesn't.

Our protagonist is a sort of upperclass everyman, brought up indulgently, then socialized and educated with others of his own set. His advantages rob him of personal vision and of any ambition other than to be admired (but not to earn admiration through effort or accomplishment). The whole book is wistful and crowded with short sentences: a sort of steady romantic drizzle overswept periodically with cold sleet.

About 15% of the text is devoted to lovely phrases, both keen observations and descriptions, and to poetry authored by the characters, some rather nice but none having much bearing on the story. This makes for pretty trim and, along with the sleeting sections that seemed about to flush a story out of the wet rambling melancholy, kept me reading. Unfortunately the good writing is counterbalanced by surges of name-dropping, especially of other authors (primarily Fitzgerald's contemporaries and immediate predecessors) and figures thought notable at the time; the vast majority of these persons no longer enjoy the relevance they apparently had then, so any power invoking them may have had at time of publication was wasted on me.

The whole book leads up to a punch-line ending with which the reader cannot agree, as there is no supporting evidence for it in all the preceding text. Fitzgerald may want us to think the protagonist believes it; if so, he's written a novel in which a bland, dispirited, and fundamentally uninteresting protagonist experiences mildly negative character growth, and has nobody to fault but himself (and possibly his parents).