This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fiction (Released March, 1920)
Bottom Line: Skip it.
Summary: The coming of age story of Amory Blaine and his wealthy Princeton cronies in the 1920’s.
My Thoughts: I recently read and absolutely loved Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, a fictional story about her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald told from Zelda’s perspective. It covered the periods when Scott (as he is called in Z) was writing This Side of Paradise (his first novel) and I learned that it was the most commercially successful of all his books at the time of publication. Let me tell you, there is a reason people still read The Great Gatsby and you never hear much about this one. It was truly awful! I have no idea how it was ever more commercially successful upon release than Gatsby. There is no real plot, which is to be expected from a coming of age story, but you need fantastic characters and a strong sense of time and place to make this kind of book work (in my opinion). Paradise has neither. It portrays high-brow college life for men in the 1920’s, but I never got a true sense of that world. The characters, especially Amory, are completely dislikable…pretentious twits, actually. And none stood out in my head – I actually can’t remember a single character’s name other than Amory’s and his mother’s. The whole novel is completely frivolous and silly, but is written in overly stilted and serious language that strives too hard…a bizarre combination. It was painful to read, I tuned out large sections, and I couldn’t wait to be finished with it. To be honest, there is no way I would have finished it if I didn’t plan to write about it here.