This one really stayed with me in a way that even The Great Gatsby didn't after my first read-through. I will say that the first half required a bit of investment to get through, as I found Anthony and Gloria to be positively insufferable characters to follow. It's all in service of an enlightening second half, however, and one that really sticks the landing.

Fitzgerald uses these lazy, overeducated and overindulgent characters to run screaming through the themes of immaturity, beauty and self-sabotage and, though he is indisputably the signature voice of 1920s literature, the symbolism here is timeless to the point of being just as accessible to a modern audience. Fitzgerald lays out a perfectly constructed maze for these characters, each torturous turn the product of their own misguided actions, and the cheese at the end symbolizing wasted youth, and the irony that the wisdom gained through their myriad foibles would have been useful at a younger age in preventing their present misfortunes.

A brilliant piece of writing, executed with the technical brilliance Fitzgerald will forever be known for, and boasting an ending that will surely take ponderous residence in the back of my mind for some time to come.

I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.
– Gloria Patch

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The Dandy, Anthony Patch, falls in love with the most sought-out girl: the beautiful and aloof Gloria. They marry and become the it couple everyone wants to be with. Their nights are full of champagne and parties, and the days are spent in idleness, waiting for the next party to fill the void. Anthony’s inheritance is endangered because of their wildness. What now? They can’t imagine a life without luxury. Nor is Anthony capable of holding on to a job.

The Beautiful and Damned was an incredible reading experience. Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship has always impressed me, but this time it took my breath away. The writing was so beautiful that it took me ages to read this book. I turned the pages carefully and read passages over and over again, devouring each word like a delicious piece of chocolate. Some parts demanded to be read aloud.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.

I loved Fitzgerald’s depiction of the Lost Generation. The clash between the wild nights and the empty days fascinated me. The weird characters who think luxury is a birth right but cannot degrade themselves to take a job were brilliantly described. I also wanted to slap them out of their idleness. Get a hobby, you morons! Get excited about real things in life and not just fleeting things like champagne and beauty. In other words, Grow Up!

I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.

The character Gloria amazed me. The way she was introduced as an almost supernatural Goddess was so cleverly done. I’ve been curious about her ever since reading the novel about Zelda Fitzgerald who was often compared to Gloria. In Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, we even get to see Zelda posing as Gloria, giving interviews as the character.

Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting – it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.

My blog: The Bookworm's Closet

I read two books by Fitz in college - The Great Gatsby and Tender Is The Night. Although they both looked to be right up my alley, I didn't enjoy either one, and since then, I hadn't read Fitz again.

Recently two things happened - first, the resurgence of Hemingway over the last year or so brought in its wake a lesser resurgence of Fitz, since the two ran in the same circles. Second, while reading Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, I learned how the change in one's perspective over time does impact how we view what we had read in the past. I figured that 20+ years was plenty of time to have changed my perspective so I decided to give Fitz another try and with something that I hadn't read previously no less.

My initial reaction to the book was how the tone of Fitz' writing is the same in each of his works and how the subject matter in TBAD touched in some of the same areas as TGG and TITN. I started to get the feeling that like Hemingway, perhaps I was more interested in Fitz the man than Fitz' the author. Then, as the story moved on, I became completely caught up in the characters and the lyricism of Fitz' writing.

Don't get me wrong - this book is a complete downer filled with sadness and despair. However, I view the story of Anthony and Gloria to be an important one, and as with many other classical works, it remains relevant. I have so much going on in my head right now about this book that I am struggling to find the words to give insight on it.

Nevertheless, overall, I would highly recommend reading this one. I'll also now be lining up both TGG and TITN in my queue for reconsideration. I have a feeling that my perspective on Fitz' works is changing for the better.

Un libro che sembra andare a ritmo di jazz. La prosa è veloce, incalzante, scintillante, come la New York degli anni 20.

Un’epoca contrassegnata dal benessere elitario, dalla prima ascesa della società di massa, e da diverse stravaganze artistiche: il Dada, il Surrealismo, l’Art Dèco. "Belli e dannati" trasuda deterioramento morale come spesso in Fitzgerald, mentre le sparkling notes alla Bix Beiderbecke e Pee Wee Russell sembrano riecheggiare al voltare di ogni pagina.

The Beautiful and Damned was both emotionally draining and utterly fascinating. I think it helped that I was listening to it on the way to and from work so I got it in small bites. That helped break up the story. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book, but I did. I thought I would hate and despise Anthony and Gloria, but I didn't. In fact, I liked them initially. As their world began to crumble, I pitied them. I didn't despise them, though.
I almost would rate this 5 stars except I didn't quite like Gloria. She didn't seem real. She seemed like a man's idea of a beautiful woman. The way she would respond to something or a particular action...it felt off. Not quite right.
Overall, I found this book very satisfying.

The Beautiful and the Damned was the second book by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1922 when he was twenty-six years old. It is said to be very much autobiographical and based on the unpredictable and volatile marriage of Fitzgerald and the very willful Zelda Sayre. The Beautiful and the Damned, coming out on the cusp of the Jazz Age, the aftermath of the Great War, and the declining economy, with the predominant theme in this book as to how wealth and power affect people. It has been described as a morality tale, a meditation on love, money, power, decadence and social commentary. The book explores the courting relationship and subsequent marriage of the fictional Anthony and Gloria Patch in the early twentieth century. Anthony Patch, while initially interested in writing, pursuing that course but relying mostly on the anticipated inheritance from his extremely wealthy grandfather, Adam Patch. However, when he was disinherited, multiple lawsuits were filed as the will was contested over a long period of years. It is within this backdrop that we watch the undoing and unraveling of Anthony Patch as he descends deeper and deeper into despair and alcoholism. It is a disturbing book on many levels as a lot of social themes are explored. It is a book that I will read again.

"The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance--that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it--then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion."

The Introduction to The Beautiful and the Damned was a very enlightening and intuitive piece written by Pagan Harleman, studying literature at Columbia College and obtaining an MFA from NYU. I would like to end with her words about the book as follows:

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"'The Beautiful and the Dammed' is Fitzgerald's least known novel, yet it provides fascinating insight into his development as a writer and his evolution as a person. Stylistically, it functions as the intermediate step between the unfocused but exuberant vitality of his debut novel, 'This Side of Paradise,' and the superb craftmanship of his third and in many ways, his greatest book, 'The Great Gatsby.'"

n

I'll Be Damned

How could the same F. Scott Fitzgerald who composed such a brilliant novel in The Great Gatsby have preceded it with such a lifeless moral tale?

A bantam-cock and his haughty hussy, Anthony and Gloria Patch, squander their days for more than a decade of their lives anticipating an inheritance of a large part of the estate of Anthony's grandfather, a Rockefeller-type magnate, who excludes them from his Last Will and Testament because of their debauched style of living.

It's just hard to be captivated by two despicable anti-heroes.

The gritty sand before the pearl.

There is no doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald can handle language. He writes in such a delicious manner that he can keep you going for a long time on that alone, no substance required. That is exactly what he does for the first half of The Beautiful and the Damned. I fully admit that I became weary of this novel by the halfway point, then, in that manner that is also so very Fitzgerald, he began to focus the story and I was lured to go forward to the end.

If any author can invent characters that are unappealing in themselves, Fitzgerald is the guy. I found absolutely nothing redeeming in either Anthony Patch or his wife, Gloria. The two of them are pretty much the epitome of spoiled, selfish, wasteful lives, people who contribute nothing and suck up everything around them. If we are meant at any point to feel sorry for them, it was a miss for me. We watch them deteriorate from a point that might have seemed itself to be rock bottom.

Gloria is a woman who depends 100% on her looks, her beauty, to carry her through life. Anthony is a man who feels no need to accomplish anything in life because he believes he is going to inherit millions from his grandfather. As a result, they live lives devoid of any meaning or purpose. Gloria is too selfish to want children, Anthony is too self-centered to stoop to work. You can’t help thinking that society and their families have set these two up for failure, and failure in a worse form than mere financial failure.

I read this too quickly on the heels of Tender is the Night. I have Fitzgerald burnout. I’m glad he wrote Gatsby, otherwise I think I would not be able to regard him as a great writer, but only a sufficient one. I always hate closing a book and saying to myself, “glad that is behind me.”

Published in 1922, this book seems to eerily mirror Fitzgerald’s own descent into alcoholism and destruction 18 years later.

Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria represent the moneyed class in America, at the turn of the last century, living hedonistic lives funded by inherited wealth, or expectations of future inheritances. They do not work for a living and are good at absolutely nothing, other than their good looks and elegant tastes. They abhor the middle classes, who are considered the enemy, and who are depicted as “perspiring, tearful, struggling, greedy, ambitious, bearing hope more sordid than despair.” Anthony and Gloria stagger from one drunken party to another, idolizing beauty, and pouting poetry, philosophy, Existentialism, Bilphism and other idle speculations of the day, and continue to run through their friends and fast- depreciating capital in post WWI New York, while living in hope that Anthony will inherit the millions of his grandfather, another one of those middle class types who ended up a wealthy industrialist and a right wing philanthropist.

But Grandfather Patch is not impressed with his grandson’s lifestyle, disinherits him, and dies, leaving Anthony to wade through the courts to recapture his lifeline. Too late, Anthony’s and Gloria’s attempts at employment, driven by desperate economic need, end in total failure: Anthony tries to become a bond salesman and winds up drunk in a bar after a day of rejections, while Gloria auditions for the movies only to be told that her fading beauty (the single thing she values) is only good for a “minor mature role.” Their tragedy is heightened because in their case it is the rich trying to enter the world of the poor and failing at it.

The prose is mellifluous although dated. Sex is limited to kissing and therefore no one gets pregnant, as most romances predictably do, thank God! Dialogue is not Fitzgerald’s strong suit, for some of the lines seem to come out of a P.G. Wodehouse world of upper crust England of the same period. I thought New Yorkers spoke differently! Some scenes are even written as script out of a stage play and I wondered whether this was an acquired style of the time, or a Joycean emulation that subsequently went out of fashion.

Following a slow start, in which the author takes his time to set up scene, character and setting (I’m not sure that publishers will have patience for this kind of pacing today), the novel marches on, gathering momentum, to a tragic conclusion with a twist that surprised me.

Despite his own alcoholism, Fitzgerald probably intended this novel as a cautionary tale to those contemplating the idle life of leisure. Basically he was saying, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” Or another way of looking at it, as Gloria would say, “Let’s burn through all our money in three years, and then let’s die.”

I'm going to say this now. Reading this book caused me to not only fall into an extreme reading slump, it also was the book that got me back into the book blogging world. There is an extreme rant review for this one over on my blog: https://marriedtobooksreviewsandblog.... Please note that my rant review does contain a couple of spoilers regarding the storyline. I don't put spoiler reviews onto my Goodreads, hence why I won't be copying my review for The Beautiful and the Damned over. If you are interested in reading the review, click on the above link! If you would like to subscribe to my blog, you can either through a WordPress account or a valid email address.

I love Fitzgerald. I will always love Fitzgerald. Just not this particular Fitzgerald. That Much, anyway. Aside from occasional genius of word twisting beauty, I feel like this is just This Side of Paradise having its existential midlife crisis and hacking up an alcohol soaked furball of a marriage plot. Short-form Fitz and I need to make a date for a hot and heavy quickie.

There exists a common theme in the three Fitzgerald novels I have read and I would like to use a J. Cole lyric to explain it: "Don't save her, she don't wanna be saved."