Review - This Side of Paradise

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Part 1 - The Portrait of a Writer Struggling in his 20s.

More than anything, this book demonstrates a writer struggling to create something in his 20s. Filled with ideas, vignettes, poems, bursts of frantic energy, it never emerges into anything other than anecdotes of adolescence and young adulthood. In this respect, this book reminds me of a novel I started to write at 19 and 20 that I ultimately had to abandon (“Strange and Distant Land”). That novel, like this one seems to exist more as potential, ideas, and fragments than as a coherent something.

In some ways, the book reminds me of Natsume Soseki’s “Sorekara” (And Then), perhaps a little bit of “Catcher in the Rye.” Those books were also about troubled youths. The difference is that those novels were finished projects, complete somethings.

We’re never quite as clever as we’d like to be in our early 20s...and certainly, we lack that magical something called “depth.” The book often reaches for the clever without hitting on the deep...certainly not in the way a book like “Tender is the Night” is. And yet, you can see the elements that would become the more mature F. Scott Fitzgerald. For that reason, this book might be good for aspiring writers hoping to learn something about how writers evolve from book to book.

It also might serve as a cautionary tale for young aspiring writers: Be patient, young man. Be patient.


Interlude - A Peak into a World I Might Never Understand.


The book seems very much one of its time. What was it like to be part of the east coast upper class boarding school class of 1920? To understand the meaningful differences between being a Yale, Princeton, or Harvard man? I might never know...and the book is not a great introduction to this culture.

There are a lot of writers and philosophers discussed in this book. The novel is also, almost, a literary thesis in itself. If it is one, it’s one that presupposes your knowledge of the authors and philosophers being discussed. I have a feeling that time has not been kind to most (but not all) of the authors mentioned by Amory.

A novel is a poor place for philosophy unless one has planned it out well -- see “Sophie’s World” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” It is wise to steer away from novelizing a philosophy, especially if you are in your early 20s.

A very young man deals with socialism. A very young man deals with honor and heroism. A very young man has trouble connecting to his family and friends and thus invests mystical faith in something called “the race” -- a concept that is foreign to my ears 100 years later. (A specific race? The human race?) Every young man feels that his generation has a more legitimate gripe than the one before, that true heroism has died or that some great moral wrong has been committed. The world is impure, they discover -- not realizing that this is not some novel discovery. Every young person struggles with ways to earn distinction and to win a mating partner. But one hundred years later, these gripes seem trivial, frivolous, and hopelessly dated. If anything, they serve to remind us that when we look back at our own youths, we will find many of our day-to-day problems trivial.

This “novel” then is an artifact of the reckless yearnings of youth...angst and despair of the 1910s and then 1920s...to finish a novel! To finish! To be done! But the book is not really finished. It is, like Amory Blaine, a work in progress.


Part 3 - The Novel that Never Was.


Typically, a young novelist is held back by a lack of experience. One writing teacher told me that no good stories ever came out of a university. What I think he meant was that really interesting elements of life lay outside of comfortable institutions. He could have equally said that no good stories came out of a human resources department, insurance back offices, or the mailroom of a company.

And yet, there are interesting things in this book -- a young man goes off to war (if only briefly). A young man tries to make his way in the advertising business. I couldn’t help but think that the scene before Amory goes off to war was a truly wonderful one, but one that could be even better. Two young people, about to go off to war, thinking about how their lives are about to change.

War, poverty, the prospect of death -- these are the kinds of experiences that get people outside of their abstract views of the world. Abstractions about “race”, “justice”, and “honor” always seem more meaningful to me when there are palpable stakes. The only route to the universal is through the particular.

The only way to get me to care about Amory’s ideas is to get me to care about Amory, his upper class east coast friends, and to really immerse me in the world he lives in.

The great tragedy of the novel is that Amory Blaine has yet to really live. Perhaps I should say -- the novel has a personality, but no personage.




View all my reviews