Many years ago, I bought a set of four F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, and they sat for a long time on my bookshelf. I eventually re-read The Great Gatsby, which I’d first read in school. In 2016, I decided to read Tender is the Night, which I enjoyed more than Gatsby. But it took me nine more years to pull This Side of Paradise from the shelf.
This is Fitzgerald’s first novel and definitely not his best. There is beautiful language, of course. And he plays around with structure, dividing the protagonist’s life into parts, subdivided into chapters, and then into scenes reading like anecdotes. One of these scenes is even written like a movie script. It’s interesting, but makes the read choppy.It’s said to be semi-autobiographical. The protagonist is Amory Blaine, an upper middle-class boy growing up in pre-WWI America. He attends private school in the east and adapts to its demands. He’s intelligent, but not as intelligent as he thinks he is. He decides he wants to go to Princeton, and he does.
At Princeton, he looks around at who are the most socially successful of his classmates and imitates them. After a rocky start, his popularity rises, until he fails a math exam and has to resign from the Princetonian, a position that had given him credibility. Then he starts moving with a different crowd, and forms a couple of friendships that more or less last through the rest of the book. His best friend is a poet, and Amory also has a literary side. The book is sprinkled with poetry written by various characters.
There is a very brief interlude where he goes off to war.
He has a series of love affairs, none of which last, for various reasons. His parents die. A priest that he was very friendly with and considered something of a mentor died. He doesn’t work– he lives off the income from his parents’ investments. And then they fail and he goes broke.
Throughout, he’s egotistical and unlikeable. I read the book with as much emotional investment as the summary I’ve given. I’m glad I read it, since it’s been gathering dust on my shelf. But at the end of the novel, I was left feeling who cares?
It reminded me a little of Catcher in the Rye and a little of Maurice. If you want to read an angsty male coming-of-age story, I’d recommend Maurice. If you want to read a Fitzgerald novel besides Gatsby, I recommend Tender is the Night.