This Side of Paradise
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005
Price: $7.95
Amory Blaine was born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Not only does he have money but he is handsome and intelligent. He has it all. And he KNOWS it. He thinks he is the best looking, the smartest, the most charming person on the face of the Earth. He wants to be a winner. But he doesn't really know how to go about becoming one.
After attending an elite prep school, he is able to gain admission into Princeton. But he's not really interesting in studying or getting a career afterwards. Amory mainly sees college as a means to become the titular "Big Man on Campus". And when that doesn't really pan out as planned he devotes all his time to socializing and partying.
You would think that since he has such a big head, he wouldn't have to worry about finding a purpose in his life. I mean, he's practically God's gift to the human race. He also falls in love or at least in mild interest with a couple of women along the way. But when the glitz and glamour of money and elites starts to pale, Amory realizes there might be the need for something deeper than superficialities.
I picked up this book because for some arbitrary reason I decided to read the first books of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck in the order of their publication. Coming out in 1920, this was the first work on the list.
The main problem I had with this book was its main character, Amory Blaine. He's such a stuck up prick. Always going on about how much better he is at everything than everyone else. Looking down at poor people and other races. I picture him almost as these two eyes looking down a gargantuan nose at the world. The sad tragedy is that his view of himself as a superior genius doesn't allow him to see the truth: that he is a mediocre chump born with money.
I despised the guy much as I did some of Jane Austen's characters such as one who arrived to a ball carried on a litter. These kinds of characters live in La La Land and have no idea of how the world really works.
The characterizations in the novel are pretty shoddy in that characters, especially women, just seem to drop in and out with no reason whatsoever. The love affairs Amory has have some especially cringey lines of dialogue. I mean I'm talking Anakin-Padme cringe. At one point one of the women says "I want to have your babies". And Amory replies "I don't know how or why, but I love you". The characters are all so vapid and obsessed with their image.
That's something that I thought was so hilarious about all the characters in this book and maybe even Fitzgerald himself. The thing they were all lacking, the thing that would fill their emptiness, was the INTERNET. It's so obvious that they wanted to be YouTube personalities, bloggers and Instagram "influencers". They wanted people to notice them even though they are nobodies that do not work or really have any influence on the world. I could very easily see F. Scott and Zelda having a Twitter account chronicling their drunken excesses. It's almost a foreshadowing 100 years ago of the Millennial generation.
This Side of Paradise is very much a first novel. No author is born fully formed. It's a gradual ascendance to transcendence. Nothing is usually done ALL well. You just get glimpses of what the author will become. That applies to anyone from Stephen King to Dostoyevsky. The plot here is pretty mundane, the characters are hit and miss (mostly miss), and the overall arc of the book is jumbled and doesn't flow very well. It's only when Amory has a brief self realization towards the end of the book do we see the Fitzgerald of the Great Gatsby for a sec.
Is this an important work? Nope. If you want to be a completist of Fitzgerald's work, it's worth reading. If not, you're not missing anything by skipping this one. Just read his short stories and Gatsby.
My Grade: D
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