West of Sunset in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 12, 2023 Steve rated it it was amazing

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Outstanding historical novel that focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years (1937 - 1940), which were, for the most part, spent in Hollywood working as screenwriter. He was pretty much a failure at it, though he did gain a credit for an Academy Award winning film. But generally, with more than a fair amount of bad luck, he kept getting fired or attached to film projects that ended up getting canned. Part of this had to due, I suspect, with Fitzgerald's own perfectionist habits as a writer, bu Outstanding historical novel that focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years (1937 - 1940), which were, for the most part, spent in Hollywood working as screenwriter. He was pretty much a failure at it, though he did gain a credit for an Academy Award winning film. But generally, with more than a fair amount of bad luck, he kept getting fired or attached to film projects that ended up getting canned. Part of this had to due, I suspect, with Fitzgerald's own perfectionist habits as a writer, but his ability to keep falling off a wagon he never really fully climbed onto left Fitzgerald swirling faster and faster down the alcoholic drain. I couldn't help but recall Fitzgerald's 1931 short story "Babylon Revisited." The story is basically a wish-list of lies that Fitzgerald composed in order to make sense of his life at that point in 1931. The Jazz age was a glittery wreck of memories beyond the dark curtain of the Depression, but Charlie Wales, the Fitzgerald character in the story, is back in Paris, supposedly over his alcoholism, and on his feet with a new (if vague) job in Prague, seeking the return of his daughter from her guardian brother and sister and law. But the ghosts of the past are always there to remind Wales where he had been, and maybe where he (and the futer Fitzgerald) will be going.

Still, between the bouts of booze and Hershey bars and Coke, Fitzgerald tries to be dutiful. He has Zelda, who is in an asylum back in North Carolina, to care for, and his soon-to-be college bound daughter, "Scottie" to take of Someone has to pay the bills. I was actually surprised how much Fitzgerald, despite his numerous failures, did work. He even did, after being fired, a brief stint working on "Gone With the Wind." Despite the booze and bad luck, Fitzgerald actually gets ahead of his debts a few times. He may have been a drunk, but he was a hard working one.

Anyway, the novel is full of Jazz age flashbacks, and believingly peopled with Hollywood and Literary stars. Hemingway, Bogart, Dorothy Parker, Zelda (in various manic incarnations), all make appearances. In addition, O'Nan recreates the Hollywood studio system of the late 30s in all its dumbed-down make a buck trashy glory. You may never view TCM Golden Age movie showings the same again. For about half the book I thought "West of Sunset" was going to something of a neat but sad love story, bookended by Zelda, and F. Scott's real life Hollywood love interest, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. But O'Nan's too good a writer to let that happen. It's still a love story I suppose, but a messy and tragic one. One feels that Graham's feelings toward Fitzgerald, as she takes him into her house because of his health, are rooted more in pity than love. Fitzgerald is pretty pathetic, even as he tries one more time to fashion a great piece of writing (which would published posthumously as "The Last Tycoon"). The ghostly outlines of that last effort were probably, even if he had lived, the limits of his diminished abilities. Fitzgerald himself had by that time become a sad, unrealized ghost. Filling in those outlines would have required more than the once great writer had left to offer. ...more

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