** spoiler alert ** I loved it, and appreciate it now that I've finished it more than I did while reading. During the last hundred or so pages, I felt pretty tense, doing my best to remain unattached from Anthony and Gloria's downward spiraling state of emotions and affairs. Though I felt nothing near sympathy for them (how could anyone?), their story made me anxious, wanting to kick Anthony in the ass and tell him to pull himself together. The fact that Fitzgerald could draw me in so closely to his characters, of another era and having nothing in common with me whatsoever, is, above all, what draws me to his writing. This was the last of his five novels for me and I'm not sure yet exactly where I'd rank it, but I can declare that I enjoyed it more than Tender is the Night, and now it seems to me that he borrowed heavily from The Beautiful and Damned for the story and characters in Tender, particularly in how the featured couples in both books see their marriages come undone, the male protagonist finally left bitter and washed up.