Amory Blaine, a mid-Westerner from the middle class, embarks on what he believes to be the commencement of the rest of his life. He arrives at Princeton University, a place where he feels he truly belongs. As he steps onto the campus, he experiences a moment of supreme elation, convinced that this is the zenith of his life. This is his story, told through a diverse range of narrators, styles, and even genres. It is the account of his painful intellectual and sexual awakening during the 'Jazz Age', in the aftermath and shadow of the Great War (World War I).

As America begins to ascend to superpower status, its youth, like Amory, question the empowered way of life and, in this case, the superpowered to be way of life. Fitzgerald's quasi-autobiographical bildungsroman debut novel is a tour de force. It showcases the genius that was yet to come, as well as the failings that would later hinder his future success. Thematically, it explores America at its perceived best and realized worst, dysfunctional romantic liaisons, and, at its core, the quest for identity.

Although loathed by some critics (even to this day), it was beloved by readers at the time, becoming his bestseller during his lifetime. The novel begins with a strong and erudite man-on-campus feel that gradually evolves into something much more profound. It is the first Fitzgerald work that I have truly enjoyed, and it has now inspired me to reread and explore his other literary masterpieces. The final chapters alone are worth the read, as Amory presents contrary opinions to the monied classes in a delightful and thought-provoking manner, with arguments that remain relevant even today. I rate it 7 out of 12.

2022 read

It is indeed true as they say that the first novel often turns out to be partly autobiographical, whether it is done intentionally or not.

This Side of Paradise is the very essence of Fitzgerald, plain and straightforward. The novel is filled with easily recognizable youthful charm, a rich and poetic style, and a warm and nostalgic spirit. All in all, it is an absolute delight to read, and it has put a big smile on my face more than once. It is highly recommended.

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“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.” This profound quote from the novel further emphasizes the complex and bittersweet nature of life and love that Fitzgerald so masterfully portrays. The use of vivid imagery, such as the scent and death of roses, adds a layer of depth and emotion to the words, making them truly resonate with the reader. It is this kind of literary finesse that makes This Side of Paradise a must-read for any lover of literature.

A very flawed novel but one much adored in its day. In fact, Paradise was FSF's best known work during his lifetime (not Gatsby). Inevitably, biographers pun on it: THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE, EXILES FROM PARADISE, CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE---okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the point.

What's most interesting about TSOP (as we in the Fitz biz call it) is the new type of Bildungsroman it established. Unlike Victorian coming-of-age novels (think Dickens), Amory Blaine's story avoids easy resolution and creates one of the more realistic portraits of adolescent indirection found in 20th cen lit. I would argue that there'd be no Holden if not for Amory---which, given the lambasting Catcher in the Rye has taken lately, may not have been a bad thing.

There's much charm in here: my own favorite character is Eleanor Savage, the daredevil among the women character. Rosalind---often thought to be a transparent portrait of Zelda---isn't sympathetic on the surface, but if you understand her predicament as a teenage girl in the 1910s, you begin to feel some empathy for her. There are also marvelous bursts of rhetoric, including the closing oratory on Amory's generation, which has grown up to find "all wars fought" and "all gods dead."

On the downside, the main character himself can be cloying---something that wasn't necessarily FSF's fault. He was working with a character type known as the "mooncalf," a teenage boy pining for love, and between talk of petting and wearing other men's BVDs (you'll have to check out the "Supercilious" chapter on your own!), he can seem a bit of a woos.

Nevertheless, TSOP captured something as America entered the Jazz Age. It was a time of great change and excitement, and the book, for all its faults, is gossamer and sad in all the lovely ways we expect from Mr. Fitzgerald. It shows us the hopes and dreams of a generation, as well as their disappointments and failures. It's a flawed but fascinating work that continues to be read and studied today.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in contrast to Nekrasov who "dedicated the lyre to his people", did not undertake such large-scale projects. Instead, he carved out for himself in the gardens of world literature a niche focusing on the influence of money, big money, and very big money on the individual and Personality (with a capital P). And that's a good thing, as thanks to his lyre we have "The Great Gatsby".

"This Side of Paradise" is Fitzgerald's first book, which immediately brought him literary fame as the youngest novelist of the Scribners publishing house and the author of the generational manifesto. The financial success that accompanied it enabled him to resume his engagement with Zelda Sayre - in the novel, she is depicted as Rosalind - and determined the further themes of his creativity. From then on, Fitzgerald would constantly write about the rich, the young, the beautiful, the talented, and the carefree. About the world of expensive and exquisite things in which they live. About the specific problems they have to face. About the sufferings of those who are excluded from the opportunity to be equal among equals in the society of the inhabitants of the earthly paradise who enter these circles.

The story of Amory Blaine, who comes from a wealthy but declining family that goes bankrupt by the end of the novel: his childhood, his relationships with his tempestuous and beautiful mother, with his classmates, with his mentor, with women - is in many ways autobiographical. As is often the case, a debutant writes his first book based on himself. In this light, the author's criticism of the motivations of the young egoist ("The Romantic Egoist" - the original title of the novel, which was rejected by publishers) seems sympathetic. However, the endless mentions of the hero's beauty produce a somewhat comic impression.

Nevertheless, it should be remembered that wealth itself, which gives the owner the means of influence, the possibility of creative activity and the improvement of social institutions, is of little interest to Fitzgerald. His priority is in the aesthetic sphere, hence the exaggerated desire to emphasize the external beauty of Amory and Rosalind. Money is valuable for the ability to spend beautifully and unrestrictedly on wonderful extravagances. It is no coincidence that their marriage with Zelda became the material expression of such views.

The atmosphere of the roaring twenties, which is perfectly suited for conveying such a kind of image of thoughts and actions, is recreated in the novel with detailed precision, and Igor Knyazev's reading highlights the narrative, which sometimes may seem overly snobbish, with a soft self-irony.

Too little here to like, and yet too much here to simply ignore. This book is a collection of set-pieces that depict the life of a boy as he grows into adulthood. Amory is constantly attracted and repulsed by his peers, re-classifying them over and over again as he makes his way through prep-school, Princeton, and the trappings of a trust fund in New York.

Amory's internal struggles often seem like affectations. His lack of energy and focus is less of a concern for Fitzgerald than his hero's attempts to define success and, by extension, himself. I want to believe that this is the point, but I'm not entirely sure. Here we have a character who engages in all sorts of sinning without any hint of repentance, which leads to a rather frustrating ending. Perhaps there is some perspective and enlightenment to be found in the final chapters, and the contrast between the down-on-his-luck Amory and the successful older businessman foreshadows a trade-off between ideals and fortune. But this seems a bit too generous an interpretation to me.

Fitzgerald liberally peppers the text with poetry and dialogues. They are well-written, but at times they feel a little awkward. About halfway through the book, I learned that Fitzgerald had expanded a previously written book to create this one, and it shows.

There are moments of greatness in certain places. The self-destructive love interest, the walks in the woods with his classmate, the first kiss and date as a boy - all of these are very moving and authentic, and I'm sure they are also very autobiographical. But what's with all the school machinations and posturing? I understand that it matters to the protagonist, but it lacks real impact.

Overall, this material is so commonplace in today's media that it's difficult 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 prevented me from fully engaging with the story.

I can't help but feel that if Amory had spent a couple more chapters sweating out his beliefs in order to earn his room and board, I would have been left feeling more satisfied. I don't know if my lingering dissatisfaction is a credit to Fitzgerald or not. I rather doubt it.

After reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory. Sometimes they just don't live up to the expectations. I mean, there's really no valid reason I shouldn't have loved this book. It's filled with profound philosophical musings and snappy, flirty dialogue. It has a pleasantly disjointed structure, very much like a slice of life. It's definitely full of verve and probably contains powerful ideas. However, I just couldn't get into it. In fact, I was very impatient throughout the reading process. I found Amory Blaine to be a bit of a narcissistic bore. All the female characters seemed thoroughly self-obsessed and false. And most of the other characters were either inconsistent, unmemorable, or not believable at all.

I nearly always feel guilty about not liking a book. In this case, my guilt is compounded by the fact that someone who once meant a great deal to me loved Fitzgerald's works, especially this book. In fact, it's his copy that I still have, full of his underlinings and nearly destroyed due to the number of times it's been caught in rainstorms. But Nick, I'm sorry. F. Scott, I'm sorry. I just don't love this book like I used to.

This was a somewhat choppy piece, and from what I could gather, it was largely autobiographical. The talent was definitely present, just waiting to be nurtured and developed. However, his organizational skills left something to be desired.

I was particularly fond of this passage:

"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists may think they long to return to the pure and simple state they were in before indulging in the candy. But the truth is, they don't. What they really desire is the joy of reliving that experience of devouring the candy all over again. The matron doesn't wish to repeat her girlhood; rather, she yearns to relive her honeymoon. Similarly, I don't want to go back to my innocence. Instead, I crave the pleasure of losing it once more."

It's a sentiment that we can all identify with, and I must say that I've never come across a more eloquent expression of it from any other writer. It truly captures the essence of our complex relationship with youth and the experiences that shape us.

So how is it that this novel, despite its shortcomings, was still able to achieve success?

Ask any New York agent to represent your literary novel with a male protagonist, and he'll tell you: “Literary novels with a male protagonist are hard sells.” And indeed they are.

Think about it: How many literary novels with male protagonists have you truly enjoyed in the past, say, five years? Probably zero.

The key to the success of This Side of Paradise lies in Fitzgerald’s remarkable mastery of the Male Protagonist in a Literary Novel Problem.

But why should this even be a problem in the first place? It’s my belief that males generally don’t relate to one another in a straightforward way. Instead, they often dominate each other.

The question of ‘do you respect a full grown man?’ really boils down to: ‘is he dominant in some way?’

In a literary novel, a male protagonist is essentially challenging the status quo. He’s boldly stating that the society in which we live requires change.

However, we’re not inclined to give credence to a full grown male who thinks things should change yet is not in a powerful position. We’ll likely assume it’s just sour grapes.

So, in a literary novel, a male lead must possess enough power to have an unbiased perspective on the problem he perceives with society.

The difficulty lies in the fact that powerful, dominant men generally don’t tend to be sensitive and open-minded enough to fully appreciate a societal problem.

What’s needed in a literary male protagonist is a delicate balance of sensitivity and strength that we don’t typically see in the real world.

Many aspiring authors will pen a male protagonist who simply isn’t strong enough for us to feel sympathy for him.

And achieving this balance, or circumventing this principle, has been the hidden struggle of numerous literary authors.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a whiny, emotional punk… but he was the king of Denmark; T.S. Garp was a famous author; most of Hemingway's male leads were war veterans or soldiers or, as in the case of The Old Man and the Sea, handicapped by age.

Other ways to overcome the issue of the unsympathetic male protagonist include using youth, as seen in Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and Huckleberry Finn, or insanity, as in Hamlet (yet again), Lolita, Moby Dick (Captain Ahab), and Slaughter House Five.

The average, weak, and sensitive male should be avoided at all costs by the would-be author of literary fiction.

History demonstrates that it is only kind to those who adhere to this principle, and This Side of Paradise is no exception.

Where Fitzgerald succeeds is in his execution of what I’ll term the Snob Narrator (something he wasted no time in establishing in The Great Gatsby).

Armory Blaine is sensitive and weak in many respects—for example, his vanity—but since he is a Princeton student and literary scholar, we know he also has an element of dominance.

It’s this balance of sensitivity and strength (much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that convinces us throughout the 268 pages of this novel, right until the very end, that Armory Blaine might have the solution to what is amiss with society.

SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t. But it’s still a fun read. And very inventive.

F. S. Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is indeed distinct from his other works. Interestingly, it's his first published piece that received a fair share of negative criticism. The aspect that drew me to it was Fitzgerald's unwavering language and writing style. No matter what he undertook, he never disappointed his readers in this regard.

As previously mentioned, this is his debut novel, and I believe the story is what sets it apart. Rumor has it that it's somewhat of a biography of the young Fitzgerald, making the reading experience more personal. However, there's something about this book that I can't quite put my finger on.

Fitzgerald is truly one of my favorite authors. Yet, I always feel the need for a break after finishing one of his books. I think the reason lies in the complex structure of his novels, despite the seemingly easy-going plot. It's often about a perfect and wealthy family on the outside but not so much on the inside, a recurring theme in most of his works. While I do plan to reread this book at some point, it's not my absolute favorite among his works, even though I admire his language.

I have to say that I really didn't like this book at all. In fact, I disliked it so much that I was hesitant to say more for fear of turning it into a full-on rant.

But since some friends have asked for it, here goes. The main character in this book was completely unrelatable to me. The only time we got a glimpse into his thoughts was when he was obsessing over how much better he thought he was than everyone else. It was really off-putting.

We follow his romantic escapades as he falls in love over and over again, but we never really understand how he truly feels or why he's doing it. The motivations of all the characters seemed completely senseless to me. They were like paper dolls, engaging in strange behaviors without any understandable reasons.

And don't even get me started on the poetry! It was like Fitzgerald was being overly pretentious and trying to force in really lame (in my opinion) poetry way too many times. One or two poems might have been okay, but every time it showed up, I just wanted to close my eyes and bang my head against a wall.

Oh, and let's not forget the political ranting in favor of socialism. It just went on and on and on.

What's really interesting is how extreme my reaction was. Last year, I read "The Beautiful and Damned" for a classics challenge and I absolutely loved it. I gave it five stars and it was one of my favorite books of the year. So I was really excited to read this book, especially since it was Fitzgerald's first published work and had been so popular. But after reading it, I hated it just as much as I loved the other one. I've also read "The Great Gatsby" and had a more normal 3.5 star reaction to it. So why do these two books evoke such strong and opposite emotions in me?

Although less than a quarter of its pages are dedicated to the protagonist's years in a private secondary academy, "This Side of Paradise" gives off an extremely preppy vibe.

A slightly more extended section is focused on the hero's time in university, where he reveals himself to be thoroughly superficial. He quotes Chesterton, Goethe, Shaw, Tarkington, Trotsky, Verlaine, Yeats, Synge, Galsworthy, Huysmans, and numerous other writers without seeming to have grasped any of their works. He shines when flirting with flappers who, like him, belong to the upper middle classes.

In the second half of the novel, the wealth he had anticipated inheriting vanishes, and the girl he had counted on marrying leaves him for a man with substantial money. The protagonist attempts to find a silver lining in his situation. On the final page, he remarks that, like a good student of Socrates, he now knows himself but admits that he will have to learn many other things if he is to succeed and thrive.

For me, the most memorable moment in this rather immature novel occurs in the last chapter. The newly impoverished protagonist has resorted to hitchhiking to save money. When a wealthy person gives him a ride, he becomes bitter and starts proclaiming that the world should turn socialist. Then he discovers that the rich person is the father of a friend who was killed in WWI. He quickly realizes that his angry words are entirely out of place and that the situation demands that he express his solidarity and compassion for the grieving father. It is a touching and intelligent moment in the book, of which there are far too few.

Unlike most books that I re-read decades after initially reading them, this one has significantly declined in my regard.

However, it's important to note that Fitzgerald penned it when he was just twenty-three! I truly admire that. I'm certain that I couldn't have achieved such a book, neither then nor now.

But the only writer to whom I feel I can fairly compare Fitzgerald is himself. I've just completed re-reading two of his better novels: The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night, which is my absolute favorite among all his works. Both Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby contain passages that I find so exquisitely beautiful that my heart races when I read them. It's a palpable feeling.

So, should I assert that my judgment of this novel is fair and that Fitzgerald became a better writer as he grew older? Well, one could argue that age always enhances us... but that's not necessarily true, is it? I don't assume it's true for artists, especially, as some burn brightly and then fade away early. Nevertheless, I'll uphold my belief that Fitzgerald did quite the opposite: his flame grew increasingly brighter until it was extinguished by a sudden heart attack. We know that he and Zelda had a tumultuous marriage that took a toll on both of them, but that also seems fated. We also know that his alcoholism consumed him more and more as he aged. Either despite or because of all that, he matured into a magnificent writer. But he wasn't there yet at twenty-three.

The parts of This Side of Paradise that I liked, I liked very much. However, the book's quality varies greatly from chapter to chapter, not so much due to the writing itself (even at that young age, Fitzgerald was talented with words) but rather the chosen content. At times, for long stretches, I found Amory's喋喋不休 about himself, "his" women, his beliefs, and his life excruciatingly tedious. I realize that this is part of the point: It's a cliché but still true that when we're young, many of us are quick to judge our elders as silly old fools, to tell them how they've got it all wrong, and to dream of ourselves as budding geniuses on the verge of greatness. Amory was no exception to this; in fact, he was rather the poster-child for the enormous vanity, arrogance, and folly of adolescence and early adulthood, which means that in many ways, he was a crashing bore.

Another issue I had with this book, aside from boredom: Perhaps due to the current sociopolitical attitudes that bombard us daily, I found it difficult to continuously stomach Amory's frequently repeated and sickening attitudes towards the poor, towards "foreigners", and towards any woman who didn't meet the beauty standards of his day. I should clarify that it's a principle of mine to appreciate works of art in their own terms, in their own right, and within their own social, political, and cultural contexts, rather than judging them against our current cultural ideals. But that doesn't mean I never tire of reading about characters who find foreigners "disgusting" and poor people loathsome. Seriously, I needed a break and was relieved when the end arrived.

Also, I feel that the book hasn't aged well compared to Fitzgerald's other works. To me, it reads as very much of its time, and that time was the first two decades of the twentieth century. Amory was a trendy sort, and those trends seem silly and uninteresting to us now, which is the nature of all trends. Additionally, Amory's taste in writers, especially poets, at that time doesn't align with my own, so I found his regular digressions on poetry tiresome and dull. Swinburne isn't to my liking at all, but he was among the better ones mentioned, aside from E.A. Poe and Rupert Brookes, for both of whom I have some affection. It's my own fault that, because of the type of reader I am, I'm constitutionally unable to skip parts. But I can still blame Fitzgerald for making me read it!

So, that's my perspective on This Side of Paradise from this side of adulthood, now that I'm old enough to be Amory's mother rather than his girlfriend, as I was the first time around this particular literary dance floor. :)