This is perhaps one of the best stories for a twenty-something year old to read during the recession, especially if they have had to set aside their dreams and currently search for something less than extraordinary in order to survive. It is amazing how relevant it is even so long after the emergence of the Jazz Age. Where the book was focused on the clash between old Victorian ideals and the emerging youth liberalization after the first World War, today we find ourselves just as lost. These wars that we've been fighting and this recession that we are suffering through will redefine our nation just as it was redefined after the conflict of WWI. The question is how?

Amory is caught in the very center of this clash between Victorian conservatism and youth liberalization. It is up to him and the other young men and women of the times to either create the new new, or stick with the old. I see the character of Amory Blaine in the face of all my college friends who had dreams of what their lives would be like after graduation, only to have those dreams dashed upon the rocks of this recession. Let us all pray that in the end we don't end up like Fitzgerald, who modeled his character Amory after himself. Let us hope that we don't follow in the path of Amory and are able to regain our aspirations when things improve, otherwise we might drown our hopelessness in bottles of alcohol until it kills us just like the famed U.S. author that wrote this book.

2,5*
Rich college boys, full of themselves. Not much of a plot. The poetry in between didn't help either. Writing felt like it intentionally matched the characters, jumping from here to there, rather bland without any thread or purpose, only a few sparks here and there.
And so my streak of mid books continues.

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.

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.

[Revised, shelves and pictures added, spoilers hidden 7/24/2022]

This was Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was 23. So it’s a coming-of-age novel and semi-autobiographical.



Our main character, Amory, is presented to us as a not-very-likable egotistical young god. “…he wondered how people could fail to notice he was a boy marked for glory…” He’s so “remarkable looking” that a middle-aged woman turns around in the theater to tell him so. He’s the football quarterback but hey, who cares, he gives that up. We are told older boys usually detested him.

He’s a big hit with the girls but he’s disgusted by his first kiss. There’s a lot of chasing of girls, drinking, partying, driving fast cars and a tragedy. The blurbs tell us that some young women used the book as a manual for how to be a jazz-age flapper – this in the 1920s. We even get a bit of goth when we are told that with one girl “evil crept close to him.”

The book is dense with themes, the main one being wealthy young men in an ivy-league environment – Princeton, where Fitzgerald went. So there’s a lot about college life and the competition among young men. We read of endless hours over coffee BS-ing about philosophy and their ‘rushing’ to get into the ‘right’ clubs.

There are a lot of excerpts of poetry he was reading and writing and one-sentence judgments about the classics they had to read in those days. And a bit about writing: “…I get distracted when I start to write stories – get afraid I’m doing it instead of living…”

Hanging over all these young men is not just the usual ‘what am I going to do with my life,’ but first, waiting to survive being drafted into World War I. Our main character is conscious of the changing of the generations and their different values: The Victorians are dying out and the WW I generation is in. They are playing with socialism.

He’s prescient when he tells us “Modern life changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before…” It sounds as if he’s talking about the age of the internet.

By the end of the book he is world-weary, rejected by a woman, fighting a bout of alcoholism. Disillusioned, he turns against books, women and faith. He has no family left. He is amazingly blasé in how he shrugs off the deaths of his father, then his mother, and finally a monsignor who was a mentor and confidant.

At one point Amory tells us “I detest poor people” because he saw “only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity.” Was he a Democrat or a Republican? LOL.



Almost noir and a good book. You can see Fitzgerald’s emerging genius.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles, while reading Paradise. There were many similarities. Rich young men coming of age (at a prep school instead of university) while a war goes on (WW II instead of WW I) with the draft hanging over them.

Top photo of Princeton in 1915 from princetonarchives.tumblr.com
The author (1896-1940) from thefamouspeople.com

Fitzgerald è gli anni '20 e gli anni '20 sono Fitzgerald

DNF @ 20%

I really, really tried to like this but I just couldn’t…

The first chapter, while sometimes difficult to get through, was still somewhat readable. But everything after Amory arrives at college was really testing my patience (and ability to read).

I was expecting to love this, especially since The Great Gatsby is one of my favourite books, and I’ve also adored The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and every other short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald I’ve ever read.

Now, I assume it’s because this was his debut novel, but I found the writing so dense it took away all pleasure out of reading it for me. Despite the fact that every single sentence is a complex one, it also feels like each one has at least three metaphors and thirty adjectives. I cannot-

Although less than a quarter of its pages are devoted to the protagonist's years in a private secondary academy, "This Side of Paradise" seems extremely preppy. A slightly longer section is devoted to the hero's time in university where he shows himself to be thoroughly superficial. He cites Chesterton, Goethe, Shaw, Tarkington, Trotsky, Verlaine, Yeats, Synge, Galsworthy, Huysmans and scores of other writers without appearing to have understood any of them. He is at his best flirting with flappers who belong like him to the upper middle classes. In the second half of the novel the wealth that he had counted on inheriting evaporates and the girl that he was counting on marrying dumps him for a guy with solid money. The protagonist tries to see a bright side to his situation. On the final page, he notes that like a good student of Socrates, he now knows himself but acknowledges that he will need to learn many other things if he is to thrive and prosper.
For me the best moment in this sophomoric novel came in the last chapter where the newly impecunious protagonist has resorted to hitch-hiking in order to save money. When a rich person gives him a ride, he becomes bitter and begins to proclaim that the world should become socialist. Then he learns that the rich person is the father of a friend of his who was killed in WWI. He quickly realizes that his angry words are entirely inappropriate and that the occasion calls for him to express his solidarity and compassion for the grieving father. It is a sensitive and intelligence moment in the book of which there are far too few.

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 ?

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

This was Fitzgerald's first novel...it presages his budding introspective genius. His monologues are somewhat long, but still fascinating about the meaning of life.

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."