This Side of Paradise

Ok, I finished it, partly so I could try and do my part to steer other readers away from it, if possible. Some form of the word "bored" shows up some 30 times in this book, as the main character is tireless in expressing his boredom; I couldn't agree more. Or I should say I was bored when I wasn't actively hating this thing.
I don't know what Maxwell Perkins (editor who fought to get it published) was thinking; or H.L. Mencken ("the best American novel I have seen of late" a commendation which is a little ambiguous: just how many novels had Mencken seen of late?); or the many people who bought it. I can't believe this put Fitzgerald on the literary map. Pretentious. Empty. Clunky. Characters too lifeless to even be unlikable. Dialogue show more that grates on the reader's ears.
Because I enjoyed Gatsby (long ago) and Beautiful and Damned (more recently: didn't love it, but it had its moments), I may someday be brave (or foolish) enough to try Tender is the Night...but it won't be this year.
One of the only scenes in TSoP I found at all poetic or even interesting may, it turns out, have been lifted from Zelda's diary. Maybe I'll read Save Me the Waltz...
(Sorry, Scott...I really wanted to like this...) show less

As the twentieth century emerges from its egg, Amory Blaine rises through prep school, Princeton, and Prohibition as he struggles to excavate his potential genius.

This Side of Paradise was Fitzgerald's first novel and was published when he was twenty-three. You don't need to check the flap copy for these details; they are self-evident within the book itself, which reads like every novel written by an infant author. Fitzgerald clearly believes he has hard-won artistic truths to impart to his audience, but he is not old enough to know any artistic truths worth knowing. Baby-faced Fitzgerald lacks a crucial level of critical distance from his equally baby-faced protagonist, and the protagonist's concluding epiphanies come off as tinny, show more facile, and unearned. In contrast, the first half of the book, dealing with the adolescent Amory, evidences a more dispassionate eye: young Amory is an autobiographical sketch drawn with both bile and compassion, and his natural egotism is shot through with self-loathing. show less

Amory Blaine is young, handsome, bright, and animated by the sense of pretentious superiority that comes from having your mom raise you to believe that you’re “special” and “better.” The novel is the tale of Blaine’s journey from childhood to young adulthood: schools, chums, clubs, parties, romantic liaisons, war, starter jobs, and an endless obsession with self-definition: “Who am I? What really matters to me? What should I do with my life?” (The original title of this was “The Romantic Egoist,” which pretty much sums it up.)

It's hard to read this as anything but a biography of the author. Fitzgerald was 23 when he wrote it: young, handsome, bright, and determined to prove his literary exceptionality to the world. show more The novel is full of witty people exchanging bon mots in between earnest, more or less substantive discussions of love, beauty, religion, poetry, morality, and class expectations (while some of the explorations feel authentic, others hit as a bit too “precious” to be taken seriously), absorbed into a plot that focuses (intentionally or non-intentionally) on exposing the stifling social rules and conventions that, back in the highly socially stratified U.S. of the 1920s, were used to sort the Exceptionals (destined to be leaders of men) from the Chaff (followers and/or inconsequentials). Amory plays the game, then doesn’t play the game, exploring the consequences of each potential outcome, but appears especially fascinated by those of his peers who inhabit the space between the two castes – poets, political idealists, philosophers, non-conformists, etc.

The story is told in chronological order but it’s not a narrative so much as a scrapbook of pasted bits – anecdotes, poetry, bon mots, contemplations, set pieces. You get the sense that Fitzgerald, worried that this might be his only bite at the publishing apple, was plundering his old notebooks and chapbooks (as well as the personal diaries of his wife Zelda, if current biographies are to be believed) for anything that would make him appear precociously brilliant.

The thing is: he *was* precociously brilliant. Though parts of this hit as literary exhibitionism, other parts as moral hand-wringing, there’s also plenty of keen social commentary here, and the genuine emotional vulnerability of youth. Amory may be a bit of a conceited ass, but his childhood of adolescent angst – Do they like me? How do I fit in? Why isn’t life fair? – is brilliantly depicted and likely to resonate with every reader.

I’m on the fence about whether to recommend this. I consider many of his other works to be more substantive than this one. But the window that this provides on Fitzgerald’s emotional and creative journey (“The Making of a Doomed Literary Savant”) is a hard thing to dismiss. I emerged at the end of this a little weary, a little aggrieved, but a lot affected by Fitzgerald’s ability to evoke a world in which incandescently brilliance and haunting darkness (ambiguity, skepticism, doubt) worked in tandem to mold a doomed generation. show less

F. Scott Fitzgerald is most famous for his stories about the 'flappers' and their flippant lifestyle during the Roaring Twenties. As the times were, those stories are light and flimsy. They made Fitzgerald famous and rich as he captured the spirit of the age like no other author. However, I personally prefer his earlier and later works, when he produced some meatier novels. «This Side of Paradise» is one of his first novels. Apparently, readers are divided on this novel: some people love it, while others hate it. The novel has some experimental characteristics, such as the use of stage play dialogues.

While I agree that the novel is at times a strain to read, other passages are adoring. Particularly, in the latter part of the novel one show more has the feeling that Fitzgerald is drawing a dividing line between the emerging literary scene and the Georgian authors. This development parallels the decline of the old world and the rise of America as the latest world of wealth. The first part of the novel is still rather appealing as a coming of age story, echoing the rebellious nature of Evelyn Waugh. Definitely an interesting book, but only if you are willing to mentally invest in it and see it's merit. show less

7/10

Contains Spoilers

Fitzgerald's first novel catapulted him, almost immediately, into the realm of Great American Writers with its theme of lost innocence and disillusionment after World War I. The story is told in a frantic, disjointed style, sometimes mimicking the frenetic flappers of the jazz age: those who tried to stamp out, on the dance floor, all the malaise of their generation. Paradoxically, it is also a languid tale of a dispirited dilettante who finds himself without much purpose in his life.

It's a curious novel in which all the major moments and crises of the protagonist's life are shrugged off in a desultory fashion, almost as if they were incidentals, and not as the prime movers in his life. His father dies, his mother show more dies, his closest family friend and mentor dies, he loses his inheritance, his "one true love" throws him over in favour of a financially secure future -- but they are treated as a series of little nothings, to be brushed off. Reflective of the age, perhaps, where youth and spirits and hope and joy had all been trampled, the novel vomits forth a series of disappointments and misfortunes, leading the reader into blind alley after blind alley of impotent despondency.

As quickly as Amory Blaine falls into another disappointment, he pulls himself out in a melancholic stupor, and carries on. Not enough spirit to even be an iconoclast, Amory Blaine's existence conjures up only one word, repeatedly: dilettante. Dilettante. Sleepy-headed dilettante, for all that Fitzgerald tries to convince us otherwise.

The Jazz Age was hungry for this sort of literature it seems, for the first printing of this novel sold out almost immediately (3,000 copies sold in 3 days) , and went on for 11 more printings in the next 2 years alone. Misery loves company, I suppose, -- but then, it was a youthful novel, by a young man who "had seen it all". Indicative of its age again, the jaded of the jazz age were hungry for their lives to be seen -- and no doubt felt that Fitzgerald saw them.

Overall, I found it rather bland and annoying. I read this hot on the heels of [b:The Sun Also Rises|3876|The Sun Also Rises|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876._SY75_.jpg|589497] and in comparison, this one is a real clunker.

While the themes are virtually identical, Hemingway's novel soars with spirit and soulfulness, and disturbs and moves the reader with its gravitas. This side of paradise, on the other hand, is rather a humdrum destination. I'd rather be on the other side. show less

"I have known myself, but that is all."
Oh Amory, Amory Blaine, the poor, lost youth from the lost generation! Why do I still see you everywhere?

The book read more like an autobiography than a fiction - and I can only imagine how Fitzgerald felt while he wrote the book. His long speech about the upside-down system at the end was still so frighteningly relevant - that it makes me fearful of the future. Then again, a century has passed since then, and we are still here, making slow progress while paving the way with the lives of many. Maybe we will keep going ahead. Maybe the hopes and dreams that we sacrifice on the way today is the fuel for a shinier future. Maybe that's the curse humanity is forced to bear.

I know this review doesn't show more make much sense. It is not supposed to. I am writing down how reading this book has made me feel. show less

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/09/review-this-side-of-paradise-by-f-sco...

I've never loved The Great Gatsby. I have not yet seen the movie, though I might once it's on Netflix. Unlike one of my friends, I do not have a tattoo of the famous green light.

But Fitzgerald is so often held up as the epitome of his genre, and at a certain point it's hard to consider yourself a fan of 20th century American literature, particularly a fan of the literature that explores the construction of masculinity, if you've never picked up more of Fitzgerald than Gatsby and a few odd short stories.

This Side of Paradise left me cold, which I found charming. We are not supposed to like Amory Blaine, the brilliant but erratic con-man in training who is show more the novel's anti-hero. Money and power are the central movers of Amory's world, and the two spin around each other like water down a drain. The pursuit of both syphons all kindness from Amory, especially when his focus is power over the women he pursues.

Why would I like this book? It's misogynistic, materialistic, mean spirited. Amory is self-involved and self-aggrandizing. But I found This Side of Paradise funny.

I read it ironically, as a man in the 21st century should. Like Main Street (published the same year) or The Damnation of Theron Ware (written in 1896), Fitzgerald's characters are too much larger than life to be believable in the realist/ naturalist tradition. And, like other great works of satire, it robs the protagonist of any lasting triumphs. show less