So I read Hemingway's first novel just a little while back, and figured I might as well check out Fitzgerald's debut as well. This was the fourth work of his I've read, and it's been nothing but steadily diminishing returns for me. Loved The Great Gatsby, liked Benjamin Button plenty, liked The Beautiful and Damned enough... and only barely kind of sort of liked This Side of Paradise. What's going on here? It'd be one thing if I were reading his books in order of popularity, but no - this is probably his second-best known novel. Is it me? Is my tolerance for Fitzgerald slipping, the older I get? In this case, I actually think so, a little bit. It's not that I'm 100 years too young to have enjoyed this book. It's that I'm about five or ten years too old.
I'll explain. The book was written by Fitzgerald when he was 23 or so, and it's semi-autobiographical in nature. Which means not only was it a story about a teenager trying to find himself - rather, it was a story about a teenager trying to find himself written from the wise, old, mature viewpoint of someone who was... 23. We all mature as we age, particularly form young adulthood to middle age, gaining new perspective on everything all the time. This was actually a huge and poignant theme, at least for me, that Fitzgerlad hit on in The Beautiful and Damned. I'm not one for quotes, but Fitzgerald's so quotable, so here I go, from that book:
“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”
(I had to look it up too, but an organ-grinder's just a street musician.) Granted, okay, Fitzgerald's only 26 at this point, when this quote is published in that book, but still - he recognizes even at 26 that by 30 he's just not going to give a shit about the romantic notions of young love and endless possibility that he had when he was 20. And now, to make you feel real old - Fitzgerald's 29 when The Great Gatsby is published. Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine, and able to write an all time classic story about the folly of trying to reclaim the past. Yowza! And, oh yeah, Benjamin Button is a lighter, easier, shorter read, but it's all about aging, too. Naturally. So as far as I've gotten through his bibliography, Fitzgerald's always been obsessed with exploring the way the past and the present interact, the way it's a shame how the wisdom and maturity and opportunities that come from aging can't replace the thrill and wonder of being young. And I've always liked that about him. It's a subject that transcends nearly a century at this point without losing any of its punch - hell, the age and timelessness of these works might even add another layer to the themes. The past that Fitzgerald's characters lament and can't revisit is, like, a hundred years farther out of reach for you and I. And man, what a shame that he went ahead and died at 44, and right at the dawn of World War II. Imagine how much a crotchety old man Fitzgerald could have said? Imagine him reflecting on the Holocaust and the atom bomb? Jesus.
Okay, back on track. This book. It starts with its protagonist, Amory, playing coy and hard to get with a cute girl... at the age of thirteen. He's a precocious kid, desperately trying to play it cool with the ladies in what we today would call, I dunno, eighth grade. And right off the bat, he fucks up a classic "late arrival, keep her waiting" plan by arriving well after the rest of their group has departed for the school dance or whatever it was. This I liked! This weird subgenre of "young, dumb kid who wants to act like an adult can't quite crack it because his brain isn't done developing yet," which Wes Anderson does so well - I dig it. I can get behind a story about a high school kid flailing around emotionally and trying to understand who he is and what he wants to be - that's Catcher in the Rye territory!
But it was all downhill from there. Middle school romance gave way to prep school hijinks, which gave way to Princeton egotism, which gave way to [snooooore]. Amory got less likable and more annoying the older he got, mostly because a vain 21-year-old is so much less likable than a vain 18-year-old, who in turn is less likable than a vain 16-year-old, and so on and so forth. After several failed romances and, oh yeah, World War fucking I, which is just sort of glossed over as an intermission of sorts, the book ends with Amory realizing that he knows nothing at all, but at least he finally knows himself!
Okay, back on track. This book. It starts with its protagonist, Amory, playing coy and hard to get with a cute girl... at the age of thirteen. He's a precocious kid, desperately trying to play it cool with the ladies in what we today would call, I dunno, eighth grade. And right off the bat, he fucks up a classic "late arrival, keep her waiting" plan by arriving well after the rest of their group has departed for the school dance or whatever it was. This I liked! This weird subgenre of "young, dumb kid who wants to act like an adult can't quite crack it because his brain isn't done developing yet," which Wes Anderson does so well - I dig it. I can get behind a story about a high school kid flailing around emotionally and trying to understand who he is and what he wants to be - that's Catcher in the Rye territory!
But it was all downhill from there. Middle school romance gave way to prep school hijinks, which gave way to Princeton egotism, which gave way to [snooooore]. Amory got less likable and more annoying the older he got, mostly because a vain 21-year-old is so much less likable than a vain 18-year-old, who in turn is less likable than a vain 16-year-old, and so on and so forth. After several failed romances and, oh yeah, World War fucking I, which is just sort of glossed over as an intermission of sorts, the book ends with Amory realizing that he knows nothing at all, but at least he finally knows himself!
It's a nice notion, but it's ultimately hollow - again, this whole thing's being written and reflected upon by Fitzgerald at the age where, today, he'd just barely be graduating college. And look, listen - I'm not suggesting, at all, that no one can properly reflect on their own journey through coming of age - the teens and early twenties - during and immediately following that time period. We've all been there, we've all done it, and Fitzgerald did it as good as anyone, even then. But here in 2017, as I close in on thirty myself - I'm sorry, but another tale of a young, moneyed, white guy trying to untangle his own desires in life - it just doesn't do it for me!
And lastly, can we revisit World War I? I spent the first half of the book knowing the war was looming and knowing Amory was going to go away for it - so I really expected Amory to come back from war a completely changed man. Hardened, maybe, a drastic and dramatic "loss of innocence" now complete. But truly, it barely resonates. Granted, Fitzgerald's writing all this in the war's immediate aftermath, long before we collectively had time to suss out the symbolism of World War I, long before we even dubbed terms like "Lost Generation" or "Roaring Twenties." But still - I really thought the war, appearing right in the middle of the book and spanning a two year hiatus from the girl-chasing and social climbing of life in America for Amory - would mean something. Nope! Oh well.
And lastly, can we revisit World War I? I spent the first half of the book knowing the war was looming and knowing Amory was going to go away for it - so I really expected Amory to come back from war a completely changed man. Hardened, maybe, a drastic and dramatic "loss of innocence" now complete. But truly, it barely resonates. Granted, Fitzgerald's writing all this in the war's immediate aftermath, long before we collectively had time to suss out the symbolism of World War I, long before we even dubbed terms like "Lost Generation" or "Roaring Twenties." But still - I really thought the war, appearing right in the middle of the book and spanning a two year hiatus from the girl-chasing and social climbing of life in America for Amory - would mean something. Nope! Oh well.
I've just come to expect more from Fitzgerald. This wasn't a bad book, especially for something written a hundred years ago, but it was a letdown compared to what I was hoping for. There's still one more Fitzgerald book on my shelf, though - Tender Is the Night. People rave about this one. Even Fitzgerald called it his personal favorite work.
No comments:
Post a Comment