This Side of Paradise

At first, I was going impress you all with my deep penetrating insight by saying this book’s protagonist -Amory Blaine- is the progenitor to J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but I see Kirk Curnutt has beat me to it, by only five years. C'est la vie.

This Side of Paradise (TSOP) is F.Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, and a bit rough around the edges, but overall decent. It's more adult than A Catcher in the Rye. It follows Amory Blaine through college, World War I, and into his first year after returning from the front. Since it spans a much longer period than Catcher in the Rye, it has more character development, and takes its protagonist further into adulthood than Holden Caulfield ever gets. But for all the changes he undergoes, Blaine is still very much a work in progress at the end of this novel. He starts off as a spoiled, smug prep school grad on his way to Princeton University (class of 1916). He doesn’t take much interest in his classes, but instead sees college as a time to network with "the right sort of people". Reading George W. Bush’s record at Andover and Yale University, I can believe this is how a lot of the privileged class views higher education. Part of Blaine’s worldview is that money, power and prestige just naturally find their way to "the right sort of people", so he’s disheartened when he learns one of his fondest fraternity buddies is ::gasp:: the son of a greengrocer.

So yes, Amory's character arc starts him off as a plutocratic jerk that everybody treats with deference because of his family's influence and reputation, and he has somehow grown up believing that it is his own deserving personal attributes which they admire.

He parties his way through college, and worse yet, the chicks dig him. He’s kissed many girls. This was written in 1920, by the way, so you should probably substitute "kissed" with "fucked" to get the same effect. (Is there some sort of inflation going on with sex, the way it’s going on with money?) AARRGGHH! God, how I wanted some sort of comeuppance to wipe that self-assured smirk off his punk face. Thankfully, F. Scott Fitzgerald was happy to accommodate my wish:

First comeuppance: He loses a friend in a drunk driving incident. It's the first time the Universe has ever ignored his family's fortune, and told him "Fuck You". It's sort of like the scene in one of the old Christopher Reeve "Superman" movies, where Supes loses his powers (temporarily, natch) and gets punched in the face, and he is shocked, because he never knew what pain felt like.



That may be a slightly hyperbolic comparison, but it roughly works.

Second comeuppance: His failed courtship of Rosalind. For once, his family's money and power work against him... in that they don't have enough of it. She leaves him for another rich deadbeat heir, who's connected to an even bigger fortune. I had a schadenfreude meltdown over this- laughing on the couch, jabbing my index finger into the page for emphasis, and exclaiming "Suck it up! Now who’s the chump?" – at which point my wife looked up from what she was writing, and asked "What are you reading?"

But it is delicious, isn’t it? Amory has been walking over people his whole life, just because his social standing allowed him to; and he developed a whole plutocratic fantasy philosophy to justify it: that entire bit about "the right sort of people" and how they could do and take as they pleased because their pedigree demanded it. Now suddenly he's on the other end of that. What can he do? If he points out how unfair and unjustified that whole philosophy is, it will make him a hypocrite. I guess I like this part so much, because Fate does have a way of making us into liars, hypocrites or victims of our own doctrines, doesn't it? We start off with one idea, and Experience pokes holes in it, demonstrates its weaknesses, and if we aren’t completely stupid, we usually change our way of thinking to allow for a broader, more sophisticated view of the world. Sometimes the process is painful and humiliating, as it is here.

After that, life continues to hand Amory the usual shit it has handed a lot of people. The horrors of World War I, for example. Actually, it isn’t elaborated on much in the book, which is surprising. This Side of Paradise was completed in 1919, and the profound effects of the war on that generation were being explored by so much writing of the time (e.g. [book:Soldier's Pay|432324], [book:A Farewell to Arms|10799], etc.). Fitzgerald was enlisted in the Army but never saw foreign service in World War I, so maybe he was rightly avoiding writing about something he had no direct experience with. I can respect that.

I’ve already made this a bit too much of a plot summary, so I won’t give away any more. Suffice it to say that Amory expands his horizons a bit, he loses some of that ugly self-entitled attitude, and he starts to see the world as others might see it. He makes a noble sacrifice for a friend. His crazy girlfriend kills a horse. He realigns his priorities a bit, and he begins to take notice of some of the larger, greater issues in the world. Near the end, he’s a Trotsky-quoting socialist advocating for a Soviet-style order in America. On one hand, this seems very topical and interesting for an American book written in 1919, but on the other hand, it’s just as bad as being a plutocratic oligarchical apologist; just in the opposite direction (well, not really, because Western banking oligarchs funded the Russian Revolution , but from the standpoint of a kid in 1919 who didn’t know that, it was opposite).

Fitzgerald pulls the story out of the fire at the last moment, with a development which implies Amory is still on his journey of self-discovery. It hasn’t ended in Bolshevism; he’s still refining his understanding of the world and of himself. I think that’s about as good an ending as a reader can hope for, in a coming of age story.

-Thanks, Kelly! ( )

Glanced through other reviews: bored by philosophical shpeel? It rings of elitism? There's no real plot? Obviously, everyone is entitled to their opinion. If saying so sounds dismissive, it may be because one person's entitlement to have them is different from an obligation in the rest of us to heed them.

It isn't The Great Gatsby. That is true, as so many reviewers below point out, but then again all books but one aren't The Great Gatsby. This is a great example of the Bildungsroman. The journey of reading this sort of story is to see a character take shape in interaction with an environment. The interesting thing with Amory--the "Egotist"--is how conscious he seems to be of his own Self taking shape, even from a very young age. He is hyper-aware of how his poses redound upon his reputation in society. You are, I think, absolutely meant to recoil at the self-indulgence and shallowness of his patrician lifestyle. His philosophical musings are, I think, meant to sound amateurish. Many of his romantic woes are meant to seem maudlin. If he seems to be drifting through life, I think it's in the nature of his generation, it's representative of a time and place. Note the conspicuous absence of the World War; there's an elephant in the room. To those who felt there was no plot, that Amory doesn't undergo a change, that the story seems to promote class-ist sentiments, you perhaps gave up before the culminating dialogue between a thoroughly broken-down Amory and the father of one of his dead Princeton acquaintances. His love life has been repeatedly sabotaged by economic interests, his family fortune is entirely dried-up, his mentor has died beloved for his service to mankind, and Amory has no idea what to do with himself. Facing real poverty, he goes on to articulate a case for Socialism that rings true even today: a society that refuses to make concessions to its working class cannot be surprised when they resort to organization and agitation on their own behalf. He calls for a meritocracy where every child (or every male child) is begun on an equal footing with equal access to education and opportunity and called upon to achieve for the sake of honor and self-respect rather than mere financial gain. Amory plans to commit his pen to the cause of social justice. Surely this is not an argument for elitism, and surely this is a change from the Amory who cared only for his social status. Best of all, his transformation--admittedly sudden--organically arises from his experience, from thwarted love most of all. Amory himself concedes that his zeal is a sublimation of his feelings for Rosalind, and a poor substitute.

There is that Ancient Greek axiomatic exhortation to "know thyself." In This Side of Paradise Fitzgerald has posited a case in rebuttal. Amory's excessive self-consciousness is his stumbling block. Even in the end he cannot escape his own scrutiny. Even he knows that his self-knowledge is an impediment. "I know myself... but that is all."

So, this book:
*Makes a philosophical statement about a well-lived life
*Has a political message about the world
*Captures the tone of a period in history
*Sketches a complicated and evolving personality (personage?)
*Is written in an innovative structure
*Is written with powerful language
*Provides insights into the early life of one of America's greatest writers
and
*Is capable of inspiring strongly differing opinions and perspectives.

If only he'd never written The Great Gatsby. Maybe then we could read the rest of his work in peace with a clear head. ( )

The writing is pretty good, but the story drags. There's no real plot, which I suppose not every book needs. But while I liked Amory Blaine, I also found him kind of boring.
Fitzgerald had a tendency to write only what he knew, since all his books are kind of related to the same idea of disillusionment, and the the separation between the classes. I never finished it, but I got about halfway through and I thought it was okay.

It was nothing compared to The Great Gatsby. ( )

eBook

You know something's wrong when the climax of your book involves your main character talking to a completely new character about communism. The real problem, however, is that Fitzgerald's book focuses on a main character who is not only insufferable, but boring as well. The side characters exist merely to give him something to do and the plot meanders pointlessly.

I've read somewhere that This Side of Paradise is somewhat autobiographical, and while that might explain some of it, it fails to excuse any of it. This was a pointless exercise in tedium. ( )

Beautiful writing is its best attribute ( )