This Side of Skepticism

For those who haven't read it yet, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a semi-autobiographical novel about the coming of age and loss of innocence of a wealthy boy named Amory Blaine. It was the first novel that Fitzgerald published. He was fresh out of Princeton.

I started reading This Side of Paradise as a skeptic. Fitzgerald is generally known for his "lyrical" prose, which I thought from reading his more famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was more pretentious and weightless than lyrical - weightless as in lacking the seriousness and depth of someone that has truly struggled or suffered, just as you would expect from an author that grew up with Fitzgerald's privileged background. I recall with The Great Gatsby that I found it difficult to get past his "style" to find any substance in it, such that even after finishing the novel, I was hard pressed to find a good topic for a paper. Yes, I know, commentary/exploration of the American aristocracy, American dream, new money and old money, blah blah - to me it was just a rich person writing about what he knew, which was other rich people.

Not having been entirely impressed with The Great Gatsby, I hadn't read anything by Fitzgerald in over a decade, so I had very few expectations for This Side of Paradise other than some light reading in pretty prose about a wealthy young boy growing up. My impressions from Gatsby of pretentiousness and weightlessness came flooding back as I started to read This Side of Paradise, where I found the same flowery prose (this time sans the sinister undertones of adultery and murder) and worried I'd get annoyed and never finish; but unlike with The Great Gatsby, by the end of This Side of Paradise, I understood and felt its gravitas.

I started out enjoying it as a story about a carefree, young boy growing up with the leisure of an excellent private education, the luxury of being consumed by young love, and the indulgence of reading, writing and reciting poetry to his heart's content. With so much leisure, luxury and indulgence in the foreground, Fitzgerald barely had room to squeeze in a few nods to the idyllic background settings, such as Princeton and Lake Geneva.

Then the usual tragedies befall the hero - love lost, school boys part ways, death in the family, a slight implication that his family's fortune, which had never been the greatest among his peers, has begun to dwindle - and you start to feel sorry for him, but not too much. The beginnings of his disillusionment are still somehow shallow, immature and overly dramatic. You can still see him finding his way to success, marrying his second or third love, and regaining the sheen and confidence he had in his youth.

Suddenly, there's war, which comes and goes quickly in the book, but signals a dramatic shift in Amory's development. There is also the loss of a job, a deeper love, good friends to both death and circumstance, and even more money, until finally his misfortunes have stripped him of all of his ego, the youthful, unsubstantiated confidence of his youth. I was impressed with Fitzgerald's willingness to break down his hero (presumably a version of himself) to that extent.

I also found Fitzgerald's emphasis on the loss of love, both romantic and platonic, rather than the tragedy of war, to be refreshing and brave. He allows that the war changes Amory and contributes to his loss of innocence, but it is Amory's relationships that define him more than his circumstances, a notion that I agree with.

Don't get me wrong, Fitzgerald's writing is still flowery and overly dramatic all the way through to the end, and I'm still put off by his devotion to poetry, but I found plenty to love about the choices Fitzgerald made in the story, and wish I had read it first as a teenager so that I could compare my impressions then and now.