Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise was a pleasant surprise, more complex & fully-developed than I'd expected, especially given some of the critiques I'd noticed prior to reading the book.


Like many if not most first novels, This Side of Paradise, the tale of Amory Blaine's quest to find himself in the 1920s, recasts the early life of its author. As I often do, I read a biography of Fitzgerald while also making my way through his novel. In that biography, distinguished writer Jeffrey Meyers, commented:

As a youth, Scott was attractive, egotistic, socially insecure, with a lifelong weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing, unaware of the impact he had on others. Later, his wife Zelda seemed to function as a mad Ophelia to Scott's tortured Hamlet.

Indeed the reader senses much of Meyer's portrait of the author in the person of the rather effete but handsome Amory Blaine, early on dependent on his domineering mother Beatrice, middle class but affecting the air of aristocrats in their Minneapolis setting.

Off to Princeton, young Blaine continues his pursuit of status while on campus, at what was then felt to be the "pleasantest country club in America". Finding a direct path to classes had little attraction for either Blaine or Fitzgerald, who never graduated from Princeton, parties & booze holding greater sway for the would-be author, though he did participate in literary & musical activities on campus.


Thus, the stories of Amory Blaine & the author who created him seemed innately linked. But Blaine does have a friend at Princeton named Tom, a lad who seems to go against the grain, declaring "I'm sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren't barred because of the color of their neckties & the roll of their coats." Does this perhaps reflect some self-doubt on the part of Fitzgerald?

One of the more interesting aspects of this novel is the presence of Amory Blaine's father confessor, Monsignor Darcy, who counsels the young man who has declared that he "has lost half of his personality in a year", after being suspended from Princeton. Later, Darcy declares in a letter to Blaine that the young man is the son he never had, with Blaine standing as "the reincarnation of myself".

Gradually, the novel transitions into a consideration of Amory Blaine's development as a person, with Fr. Darcy's suggestion that he use "heaven as a continual referendum."

One of the aspects I liked most was the characters Fitzgerald inserts who acts as foils for young Blaine, including one killed in an auto crash, another who perished during WWI, yet another who gives away his possessions & just heads off in search of enlightenment.


Book II includes an interesting playscript and there are poetic insertions as well within the novel that seem to broaden it well beyond the tale of a young man coming of age. Throughout, Blaine has a series of infatuations that are short-lived. Blaine declares that sadly, the women were like mirrors to his own image.

Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between...but naked souls are poor things ever and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.

On another occasion, after a dissolute period in NYC, Blaine hitches his way back to Princeton, a kind of home-base and is picked up by a very wealthy man & his driver, the rich fellow just happening to be the father of a Princeton friend of Blaine, killed in the war. Blaine espouses socialism, not so much because he believes in it but because it seems an alternative pose, one that seems to demonstrate an incipient form of compassion.

At novel's end, Blaine felt that he was "leaving behind his chance of being a certain kind of artist but it seemed much more important to become a certain kind of man. I know myself but that is all."

The writer Richard Russo once declared that for many, college is "akin to taking part in a witness protection program", a time when you attempt to strike different poses, try on different modes of dress, in search of an identity.

To a large degree, that is how I viewed the character of Amory Blaine in Fitzgerald's initial novel, This Side of Paradise, a rather formidable beginning statement and in spite of its critics, a rather memorable novel.

*Included with my Penguin edition of the novel is an excellent introduction by Patrick O'Donnell. **Within my review are two images of the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald + a photo of the program for the annual Princeton class musical review for which Fitzgerald contributed the lyrics.

85th book of 2021.

2.5. This is Fitzgerald's messy and juvenile debut from 1920. It's told through vignettes mostly with no real semblance of "plot". It reads of its time and reminds me of numerous other novels from the same sort of period (Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Woolf's Jacob's Room, Nabokov's Glory). The most prominent flaw in the first half of the book is its seemingly complete lack of self-awareness: where later Fitzgerald works value vapidness as a theme, This Side of Paradise feels only vapid, without the dissection of it. This is rectified by the end somewhat but it's a lot of detached prose to read with a self-centred and fairly unlikeable protagonist Amory Blaine doing nothing. He goes to Princeton (as Fitzgerald did) and talks incessantly about his world view, what books he likes. . . These are things I usually like to read but Fitzgerald's delivery is poor. Frankly, it reads as if Fitzgerald had done and said everything that is in the book and simply recorded it all. At one point a character accuses Amory of writing things down and saving them for later, and maybe that's what Fitzgerald actually did. Other than being lifeless, the structure is mostly a smorgasbord is stuff: random numbered lists, several chapters that drop into the structure of a script with no apparent benefit, even a Question and Answer page (the latter two both appearing as chapter styles in Ulysses which I find interesting as this was published two years before). The Introduction does suggest that Joyce's Portrait must have been a great influence for Fitzgerald and he naturally tried to downplay that. Despite all its faults this novel was an instant success in 1920 and "overnight" sent Fitzgerald into money and literary fame. Just two books later he would write The Great Gatsby so somehow he learnt the craft fast. Very fast. There are tiny, tiny flashes of his later genius in here with some beautifully structured sentences in an otherwise hurricane of bland characters, bland happenings and dizzying structure.