This Side of Paradise was F. Scott Fitzgerald's most successful book during his lifetime, more so than The Great Gatsby, so I was curious to see what it was like. The answer is, it's beautifully written, but also a bit of a mess.
This autobiographical novel follows the adventures of a rather feckless youth as he grows up and becomes a pretty callow young man. I must say that, to the extent the novel is autobiographical, Fitzgerald seems to have had a bitingly merciless self-awareness. Amory Blaine, the protagonist, is a total poseur, constantly trying to decide how he should stand, sit, talk, etc, based on how others might see him doing those things. Amory is also pretentious and self-absorbed, and Fitzgerald's skewering is spot-on there, too. Unfortunately, I felt like Amory is not strong enough to bear the whole weight of a novel -- after all, it's not too hard to make fun of a 17-year-old for being pretentious. (Or even a 19-year-old Princeton student).
I should mention Fitzgerald's formal experiments in this novel. I've read a couple of his other novels and short stories, and this, his first, is far & away the most formally innovative. Fitzgerald switches into screenplay mode at one point, poetry at others, and so on. The novel was published in 1920, which means it was written while Ulysses was still being serialized. Seen in that light, the young Fitzgerald was definitely an experimenter. It's too bad that the novel's contents are less interesting than its form.
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