Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of
Paradise (1920)-A Book Review
Book Review
By Zack James
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New
York, 1920
Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the
music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the
printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors, had to laugh
a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of
free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional
off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by
authors long dead. As one might expect he would therefore not have to deal with
those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the
grave and beyond care for what some early 21st century adventurer
might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when
he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age
novel, This Side Of Paradise.
Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway,
mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one
of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not
when reviewing Paradise try to take
that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but
instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the
classic. Published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals
and more importantly the literary blog, American
Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers,
college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of
graduate students in American Literature
and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out
to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world
read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm
as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such
endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering
blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added
to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer
who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.
That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had
savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that
when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person could, give a rat’s ass (his
corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple
of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men”
extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first
review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the
food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning
both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh
to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as
if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph
when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those
long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would
later become Long Island and had upon viewing had enflamed their sense of
wonder. A paragraph she had written her freshman term paper on for American
Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.
Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance
scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabel, as he attempted
against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that
after all Paradise was about the roamings
and doings a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who
was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too
uppity habits of a small-time hood from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was
to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back
down the heap once he got in over his head with Daisy and what she stood for-wealth,
conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.
That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate
in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up
settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard
whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter
took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby.
Pointed out that the novel was an authentic
slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene
and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts
of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor
used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those
sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from
Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the
Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for
the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. So the
battle raged.
Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went
slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to
the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder
when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s
outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked
a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun
Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the
sparks fly.
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