This Side of Paradise -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think that I've mentioned this before, but I'm woefully under-read in classics--especially the American classics.  Like, pathetically under-read.  (Under-read?  Un-well-read?  Just plain ignorant?)  I've been working on it.  Up until pretty recently, the only Fitzgerald I'd read was The Great Gatsby--in high school.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed This Side of Paradise.  It didn't really feel like a traditional novel. At the beginning, especially, it felt like a series of vignettes--often pretty funny:

She fed him sections of the "Fetes Galantes" before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven.  One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother's apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy.  This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction.  Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her "line."

I love that: "succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction".  Some of the book felt so familiar and real--written differently, that passage could have been in any number of books by any number of authors.  At other times, Amory seemed almost alien to me--but I think that was due more to the time and the class than to the actual writing.

The "she" of the apricot cordial passage is Amory's mother, Beatrice.  She's a minor character--well, to the plot, not so much to Amory--but I'd read a whole book about her.  She's a character-and-a-half (not my picture of the ideal mother, but a great character nonetheless), but sadly, she isn't around much after the first few pages:

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother.  He had tutored occasionally--the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he had let off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape.  What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical.  However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier.  You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle.  There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him--in his underwear, so to speak.

It seemed like Fitzgerald was experimenting with different styles--as the book progressed and Amory aged, there was more and more poetry interspersed within the prose.  There was also an entire chapter in script format (which actually worked really well).  I'll definitely be reading more.

Comments

[James Morrison]

Dear Leila: At the risk of beinf redundant (as an Australian telling an American about the great F Scott Fitzgerald), I'd HIGHY recommend to you any decently-sized collection of his short stories. They're wonderful and underappreciated. Especially worth a look for sheer comedy value are 'The Pat Hobby Stories', 17 (I think) tales of a hack Hollywood screenwriter completely undone by the invention of talkies, and his desperate attempts to survive - one of which includes impersonating Orson Welles. Great stuff.

[leila]

Never fear. It will happen. And I always appreciate recommendations.

It occurred to me recently that part of my problem (my classics problem) is that whenever I took American Lit (high school and college both), the focus was on earlier works. So I developed a love of Hawthorne and Poe and others, but we never hit Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the other gang. Strange. (Not that I'm blaming my schooling--I totally should have read some of these by now. I am waaaay too easily distracted by YA novels).

[James Morrison]

Going to try to do this one without typos - on the subject of YA novels, I just finished a big binge on John Marsden's 'Tomorrow, When the War Began' series - 7 books, with an 8th book billing itself as the first of a new series. He's an Australian writer, and I'm not sure how well known in the US, but these books are gripping and clever, and seem to be what Meg Rosoff's book was inspired by, as they're about a group of Australian teenagers struggling to survive when Australia is invaded by a (never named as such) Indonesia. The joy of reading these made me realise I should be paying more attention to the YA shelves on my frequent bookshop raids.

[leila]

I've been meaning to read that series for a while. I'll have to make time for it.

Def. read more YA! There's fantastic stuff out there, and so many adults miss out!