This Side of Paradise by F.Scott Fitzgerald

For my first novel in my month of reading books from my favorite authors, I chose This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  This is also my "20th Century Classic" novel for the Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.  It's already July 25th as I write this.  Better late than never, I guess.

This Side of Paradise is an odd little book.  It follows the life of Amory Blaine, a wealthy young man coming of age in the years surrounding World War I.  The novel, which is broken up into three main sections and then further into shorter chapters, follows Amory through his privileged childhood, matriculation at Princeton, service in the military, and his life immediately afterward.  Rather than maintaining a straightforward narrative, the novel is presented in several bite-sized episodes from different moments in Amory's life.  The rambling and somewhat disjointed episodes reflect the aimlessness and ennui he experiences as he tries to find his place in a world that is rapidly changing.  As Amory explains, his generation is "a new generation...grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

This was Fitzgerald's first novel, and it feels like it.  While it was a commercial success for him, it doesn't come close The Great Gatsby in terms of simplicity, beauty, and theme.  Snatches of his future brilliance are buried in its pages, but as a whole, this novel feels underdeveloped and scattered.  It is successful at depicting the lives of a slice of American society from around 1910-1920 (namely, wealthy, white young men), but aside from that portrait, it isn't about very much.

As a character, Amory is less than likeable.  He is intensely self-centered, overly emotional and largely aimless in life.  He is clever and literary but struggles with mustering up the motivation to do anything.  He merely drifts between whichever friends, philosophies, and women happen to inspire him at the time, confident that his life will follow the same fairly straightforward path that all monied white men's lives do. 

This changes for him after WWI, when most of the money he was planning to inherit disappears into bad investments and the woman that he loves leaves him for someone with a more impressive income.  Amory is thrown into quite a state - uncertain of what to do next and how to go on now that the world around him is changing and he no longer has the means to continue on as he was before.  By the end of the novel he adopts some strong socialist points of view and heads back to Princeton, his alma mater, to try and be of some use to someone.  What exactly he will do when he gets there remains ambiguous.  It is generally accepted that Amory is a thinly veiled version of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, so perhaps Amory's indecision mirrors Fitzgerald's own uncertainty as a young man at the beginning of a writing career.

The novel switches up formats throughout its sections and includes third person narration, poetry, letters, philosophical dialogues and even drama as the story progresses.  The drama, oddly, works fairly well, as Amory is an intensely dramatic and emotional being himself, but the poetry and personal philosophy grew tiresome. I wished there was more story to get into and less opining on the beauty and tragedy of everything, everywhere.  While these sections definitely characterized Amory, it eventually felt like a bit much.  It would be like if I was writing a novel about myself and supplemented sections of my life story with selections from my old Geocities poetry website.  Despite my intermittent boredom, however, I did appreciate that Fitzgerald was playing around with the typical novel format.

I found the examination of women in this novel interesting.  This was the time period between more Victorian sensibilities regarding women and the flapper era.  Women were just starting to become more bold with their sexuality, and the novel discusses how they were starting to kiss men (and presumably more that that) before marriage.  While the actual female characters in the novel were all just props to facilitate Amory's heartaches, I thought Fitzgerald's discussion of their evolving behavior and frustrations was interesting.  I wish he had gotten deeper into this idea.  In particular, Eleanor, one of Amory's loves, exclaims one night on a date:

"...oh, why am I a girl?...Look at you [Amory], you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified--and here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony."

Amory doesn't really pay this outburst much attention, because it's not in his personality to care about issues that don't directly affect him.  Sadly, this little bit of feminist frustration (and Eleanor herself, for that matter) disappear into the story without any further elaboration.  

When I reflect back and think about This Side of Paradise as a whole, I feel a low-key appreciation for it.  It is not going to be a treasured favorite for me, but it was an interesting look at the early work of a writer I love.  I look forward to eventually reading Fitzgerald's other novels to watch how his writing grew and changed over the years.