Reviews for This Side of Paradise

The average rating for This Side of Paradise based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-05 00:00:00 David Gillette "Very few things matter and nothing matters very much." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise Reading The Great Gatsby was an important experience for me, coming as it did at a time when my love for reading was threatening to lapse. Having loved books from a very young age, high school English proved a bucket of cold water for my ardor. It wasn't that I struggled. Quite the opposite, as I did extremely well with very little effort (the obverse being true in physics). Rather, it was a matter of taking something fun and making it into a chore. Instead of being a leisurely activity, reading became something I had to do within a given timeframe. More than that, the sensation of being forced to get something out of a book - to find the themes, the symbols, the meaning in the text, as though it were as objective an exercise as a "find the hidden objects" game in Highlights magazine - took away all the joy. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby kept alive that flicker of love - just barely - long enough to get me into early adulthood, when I could once again read for the pleasure of reading. Why The Great Gatsby? Of all the assigned reading I've ever done, I found it the most accessible, the smoothest, and the most entertaining. Unlike The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, who baffled me then and now, I understood Jay Gatsby's desire to impress a girl. After all, I was in high school, and fruitless attempts to impress others took up most of my day. Sure, I was forced to write an essay on the symbolism, but that was easy, because the symbols were all right there, like shells on the beach at low tide, easy to find and pick up. But it wasn't just the simplicity, it was the beauty. When Nick Carraway imagined the brooding Gatsby pondering the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, I could imagine it too, as clearly as anything in the world. This is all a rather long way of saying that I was bound to be disappointed when I circled back from Gatsby to Fitzgerald's first novel: the somewhat-weird, mildly annoying, ultimately worthwhile This Side of Paradise. This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, a young boy who comes from a family with money and a good name. We meet Amory in preparatory school, follow him to Princeton, and eventually leave Amory adrift and searching. During this interim, Amory falls in and out of love, avoids combat in World War I, and carries on a series of dialogues - both internal and external - that has come to encapsulate a generation, even though it really only applies to a narrow cohort of white, privileged, upper class Ivy-leaguers with names like Amory. Fitzgerald's novel is semiautobiographical, weaving events and locations - St. Paul, Minnesota; Princeton; a lousy, heart-breaking breakup - into his fictionalized tale. If Amory is meant to be a stand-in for Fitzgerald, it is a relatively scathing self-portrait. Amory is a mostly-unlikeable protagonist: self-absorbed, overly-confident, thin-skinned, aimless and lazy. Unlike the straightforward Gatsby, This Side of Paradise is constructed of three separate acts: two "books" separated by an "interlude." The first book, titled "The Romantic Egotist," covers Amory's matriculation. It is written in the third-person, from Amory's point of view. Most of the time is spent at Princeton, where Amory is convinced that he has a bright future - and is equally convinced that he shouldn't have to work for it. I found the first book to be a bit of a chore, as Amory is a striking exhibit of undeserved privilege. He is fickle and prickly and generally unpleasant to spend time with. The peripheral characters, including Monsignor Darcy, with whom he exchanges letters, and Thomas Park D'Invilliers, a student and would-be poet, are thinly drawn at best. Certainly, none of Fitzgerald's supporting cast leaves an impression as vivid as Tom Buchanan, with his "cruel body" clad in "effeminate" riding clothes. (Since I clearly cannot get off the subject of Gatsby, I will note that the fictional D'Invilliers gave Gatsby its famous epigraph: "Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her…"). The "interlude" portion of the novel, dividing books one and two, briskly covers Amory's participation in World War I, where he served as an instructor. No further information is given regarding his military stint. Thus, unlike other postwar novels - such as The Sun Also Rises - the shadow of the war does not loom overlarge. To that end, it's worth noting that Fitzgerald himself - unlike Hemingway - never went overseas. The second book, titled "The Education of a Personage," begins with a chapter written as a play, with stage directions and dialogue. No reason is given for this temporary shift in narrative style, but it works, despite desperately calling attention to itself. Here we learn about Amory's courtship and love affair with a debutante named Rosalind (standing in for Zelda Sayre). The ebb and flow of this relationship, delineated by conversation, comes close to making Amory into a relatable, half-sympathetic human being, and salvaging him a bit from the first book. For long stretches, I felt captive to Amory's pompous proclamations. His long monologues can get a bit frustrating. Every once in a while, though, Fitzgerald slipped in a little grace note. Near the end of the novel, for example, Amory is shuffling down the road when a man in a limo offers him a ride. Amory then subjects the man to a tiresome disquisition on his economic theories. As the ride ends, it turns out that Amory went to Princeton with the man's son, who is now dead: "I sent my son to Princeton…Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last year in France." "I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular friends." "He was - a - quite a fine boy. We were very close." Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons…The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work! Mostly, though, Amory is detestable. For instance: "I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor." To me, This Side of Paradise is a rough first effort by an extremely talented author. There is some experimentation at work, as Fitzgerald transitions from third-person narrative to a play, while also including letters, poetry and verse. You will have to decide for yourself whether you are dazzled or distracted by this shifting structure. (Note: this "experimentation" might simply have been Fitzgerald stitching things together, since This Side of Paradise began life as a different, unpublished work). My paperback copy is less than three-hundred pages long. Nevertheless, This Side of Paradise felt meandering and baggy and choppily episodic. There were portions where my eyes just glazed over. But just as often, I was transported by Fitzgerald's lyrical, beautiful prose, his ability to describe a place by putting you right there: At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded windowpanes, and swimming around the tops of the spires and towers and battlemented walls… The Roaring Twenties live on in American imagination, at least as calculated by the number of Roaring Twenties parties I've attended in my life. This Side of Paradise fuels that flame. In retrospect, it has been credited - according to Professor Sharon Carson, who wrote the introduction to my copy - with establishing "the image of seemingly carefree, party-mad young men and women out to create a new morality for a new, postwar America." In reality, This Side of Paradise tells the story of only a thin tranche of America's population. Those who were moneyed. Those who were white. Those who were living fast and high during Coolidge's laissez-faire administration, unknowingly rushing towards their economic doom. Lost - or rather, ignored, completely - is any hint of a world beyond the elite. There are no minorities. There are no wage-earners. There is no indication that anyone from this time period got through life without an emotionally-jarring relationship with a flapper. Because of the confluence of author, setting, and historical moment, This Side of Paradise will live forever. As for me, I started to forget about it right away.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-04 00:00:00 Mark Huneke Entitlement courses through every word and hemorrhages forth with a youthful flair for dramatics. That a momentary blemish can nearly bring a girl to tears of despair, that looking into the very face of death wrangles only a moment's serious reflection before thoughts are turned back to the senior prom - these scenes seem too fantastical to believe. And yet, I am angered by them. I loath these characters' nonchalance about life and lives. If they were not authored into existence with such undeniable skill, I would not have wanted to charge into this book and wring their necks. This Side of Paradise is a triumph of decadence unveiled.