Faded Glamour

A useful e-mail from Alistair may have gone some way to opening From A Far Place to comments. It seems I was using the wrong settings, thus inadvertently preventing anyone, except myself, from posting anything. Now things should have changed, if anyone has got anything they want to say, that is.

A little while ago I mentioned having a little stash of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels in KL which were crying out to be read. I listened to the moans of This Side of Paradise and polished it off over the weekend. Generally critics don't have great things to say about the two earliest novels. I can recall at least one who regards them as unreadable. And I suppose they are at the side of the supremely readable The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby Fitzgerald seems to get everything right. The glamour of what Gatsby represents is as genuine as glamour can be and is perfectly in balance with the steely-eyed moral vision of its emptiness. Even the joys and concomitant pains of alcohol are conveyed with an observant neutrality quite extraordinary in one of the great (and saddest) drunks of the century. Much better than anything in Hemingway.

Now next to this level of attainment This Side of Paradise is transparently poor stuff. The plot is a mess and, as far as I can tell, Fitzgerald just gives it up in the final pages. The characters are painfully irritating, especially Amory - and since the book is about him, and Fitzgerald seems to be determined to invest him with some sort of significance, that's about as major a fault as a novel can handle. The period charm is as dated as fashion can possibly become, which is very dated indeed. And yet I quite enjoyed the whole thing. Once you accept that this is an extremely young man's book, things fall into place. And there are intimations of the real writer everywhere, particularly in the honesty with which Fitzgerald fundamentally regards the whole Princeton edifice.