F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"

I was a bit disappointed with this book. The Great Gatsby was an enjoyable read. This one struck me as immature. Fitzgerald tries out a number of styles and doesn't create a compelling narrative. This novel was an immediate success back in the early 1920s. I suppose because it caught the zeitgeist. But I can't get too excited about an upper crust wannabe who flubs. The story ends with a fizzled out "self awareness" that was underwhelming. The guy is self-centered (he calls himself an egotist), social climber who fails in his love affairs and throws over a perfectly good job because it was "too confining". It reminds me of the 1960s, also an era where upper middle class kids got "tired" of the rat race and dropped out. While Fitzgerald's goal was to hang on to the coattails of the upper class, the kids of the 1960s were happy to "go back to the land" and embrace poverty. But both are symptoms of a time rising expectations that fail to meet those expectations.

This is clearly the early novel of an as-yet immature great writer. It shows an ability to grab you with its dialog and word painting. But it is uneven and too precious in many places. Its name-dropping is a bit comical because Fitzgerald rattles off lists of authors or poets or intellectuals that are meant to impress, but sadly most of the names have been lost to history. So his ability to "name genius" becomes a bit comical.

The jazzed-up language of this book grates on modern sensibilities. A lot of his hip language was never widely adopted, so it sound tinny. The theme of self-awareness and wrestling with one's culture comes across as overly dramatic and false. For his time this might have been exciting fare, but to a modern ear it falls short:

'Rotten, rotten old world,' broke out Eleanor suddenly, 'and the wrtechedest thing of all is me -- oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid --? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girles without being involved in meshses of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified -- and here am I with brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.'

This lament that women were somehow burdened by marriage while men were not it, to me, farcical. Marriage has always been a burden for both parties. The idea that men were free to run around and have affairs while women weren't is a bit precious. It takes two to have an affair. Who were these men running around with if it weren't women.

In fact, this is a slice of upper class dogma. Men were the titans of industry and women were to sit at home and knit. That might have been true for 5% of the population, but it certainly didn't characterize the bottom 50% and was an ideal of the middle class that was aspired to but not often achieved. Victorian ethics may have claimed obedience from the arbiteurs of taste, but my grandfathers who were running around in the 1900-1930 era were getting divorced, having affairs, and living what I would consider to be pretty normal human lives. Not the lives painted by morals teachers or novelists, but the real world lives of people with short lives and big temptations.

On whole, the book was satisfactory. If it weren't a "great" novelist, I would have dropped this book in the first 50 pages. I can't say I experienced the novel. Instead I viewed it as a quaint historical novel of interest for viewpoints but not something that swept me away in its language, story line, or big ideas. Instead, this line from the lead character's self realization grated on me:

'I detest poor people, ' thought Amory suddenly. 'I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.'

Yep... that's the Bernie Madoff, the Jeffrey Skilling, the Bernie Ebbers "enlightment" which inflicts our age, the Second Gilded Age. Fitzgerald echos this in his novel set in the First Gilded Age.