Not my favorite Fitzgerald book. ( )

Finally got around to this as an audiobook. Wow! Pretty light in the behind. He becomes a much,better writer as time goes by. Sadly, his success was in an inverse relationship to his development as a prose artist. ( )

As the twentieth century emerges from its egg, Amory Blaine rises through prep school, Princeton, and Prohibition as he struggles to excavate his potential genius.

This Side of Paradise was Fitzgerald's first novel and was published when he was twenty-three. You don't need to check the flap copy for these details; they are self-evident within the book itself, which reads like every novel written by an infant author. Fitzgerald clearly believes he has hard-won artistic truths to impart to his audience, but he is not old enough to know any artistic truths worth knowing. Baby-faced Fitzgerald lacks a crucial level of critical distance from his equally baby-faced protagonist, and the protagonist's concluding epiphanies come off as tinny, facile, and unearned. In contrast, the first half of the book, dealing with the adolescent Amory, evidences a more dispassionate eye: young Amory is an autobiographical sketch drawn with both bile and compassion, and his natural egotism is shot through with self-loathing. ( )

Too much work. The poetry, and a play script section substituted for the narrative. I read it in a sense of obligation to Minnesota authors, including Sinclair Lewis, Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor, Robert Bly, and by adoption Louise Erdrich. I pondered including this in my collection of Unfinished books.

But it saved it's reputation for me with these quotes:

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'Here now', said the big man, 'you'll have to admit that the labouring man is certainly highly paid -- five- and six-hour days -- it's ridiculous. You can't buy an honest day's work from an man in the trades unions.'

'You've brought it on yourselves,' insisted Amory, 'You people never make concessions until they're wrung out of you'.

'What People?'

'Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.' ( )

Thank god that's over. ( )