I love F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, his almost florid romanticism and his poetic prose. The first part of This Side of Paradise had me completely, young glib man going to Princeton, full of himself, living a frivolous college life, falling in and out of love. I awaited the story's last part, wondering how his life might turn out. Instead, about mid-way through, and with virtually no coverage of Armory's WWI duty on the front lines, we are served a random, lazily assembled smorgasbord of poetry, memos, script form dialogue, long-winded essays on a very young person's attempt to come to terms with the world, etc. etc. etc. Most disappointing of all is the author's failure to explore the serial failure of his love affairs, a subject I wish he had addressed in far greater depth.
I kept on to the end, because of my interest in Fitzgerald's tragically short-lived career. Greatness I suppose was his with Gatsby, for it is work whose substance come through in a structural maturity, forming a contrast to the insubstantial characters and the shallow lives they live. A preface to the Paradise I read by defender Aaron John Loeb acknowledged the book's "technical errors." No, no,, we are talking strucutral errors.
And still, there is the soul of this author; but what a wasted opportunity that he should have been allowed by his editor (not Max Perkins, I hope) to stop working after the first 100 pages. Because of its second-half collapse, I can only give this book two stars.
David Lewis / ShowbizdavidGet more detail about This Side of Paradise.
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