This side of paradise

I really like very much of this book. Similar to H.L. Mencken, I do think the first half far surpasses the second, but Chapter V goes a long way to redeeming that second half. It helps to put your mind back a century to when this was first published, and when you knew nothing of Fitzgerald, allowing yourself to view its freshness. For all its flaws it is a terrific debut novel and I would have loved being there for its initial impact.

Maybe each new young generation needs its novel, while it still thinks it is different and unique and not yet cynical and disillusioned as to what it is capable of becoming. Ultimately the strength of this novel is that questioning by Amory Blaine of what he can become. Like him or hate him, those are questions most of us wrestle within during those same years of our lives. Even wondering what are the questions themselves. "'Is he pretty important? Kinda more important than you are?' Amory laughed. 'That remains to be seen,' he answered. 'That's the question.'" Later, "'But all that has nothing to do with the question.' 'Just what is the question?' Here Amory has to pause to consider exactly what the question was." And like or hate Fitzgerald's self-congratulatory basking in his own literary education, it is at least honest and authentic in its representation of the ego of youth.

And if not the specific answer, Amory at least finally senses the right direction in which to seek an answer. "He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want - not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable." Of course, how to fulfill that aim remains a further question in need of an answer.

Amory Blaine learns unhelpful and unsustainable social skills from his mother, then goes into the world: to the east coast for prep school, Princeton, and adulthood. Not much happens in prep school until he, as a senior, has a turn at that most useless of social heroes, the star quarterback. Early on he makes an adult friend who could be a guide, but the monsignor seems too subtle by half for a clot like Amory. Princeton is mostly about the friends he makes, although it lets him develop a taste for theatricals (the lead up to his crash and burn is presented as a play script). Women are met along the way, but as the women get older they get better at dealing with men like him, and the damage gets worse on each successive unsuccessful encounter. His adulthood starts at advertising agency, but doesn't survive his crash and burn. World War I happens. The story ends with Amory making a pilgrimage from New York back to Princeton, during which he has an embarrassing undergraduate dorm-room bull session about socialism in the back of a chauffeured limousine, exactly the kind of pilgrimage Amory would expect to have.

This book is credited with founding the Jazz Age, but I'm skeptical. I suspect the Jazz Age got going on the backs of the oppressed, juiced by economic delirium. This book is not that story. This is the story of a spoiled (in many ways) white boy stumbling around places where he doesn't belong, isn't accepted, and is unequipped to find his way in. It's a story that gets told over and over as the American bourgeois gets rolling, and Fitzgerald had the luck to be in on the leading edge.