Resumo de The Beautiful And The Damned

Fitzgerald is considered to be an important early 20th century American writer. I bought and read Fitzgerald's five major novels ("This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon") plus one book of short stories plus the biography "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur" by Matthew Broccoli.

His first major novel, "This Side of Paradise," along with "Gatsby" and "Tender is the Night" are considered to be great novels, and I enjoyed the reads. The other two, including the present, have a few flaws, or simply put: they are not as good. Interestingly, the Bloomsbury Guide does not rate any of the five well known Fitzgerald novels as masterpieces. His best or most complicated work is "Tender is the Night," but it is less well known than "Gatsby" which became a successful film.

Fitzgerald wrote about half a dozen novels and over 100 short stories between approximately 1917 and 1940. The short stories were done largely to make money to support his life style. In later years, he worked on a number of Hollywood film scripts. He died poor in Hollywood in 1940 at an age of just 44, leaving an insurance policy as his main asset.

Riding on the success of "This Side of Paradise," Fitzgerald created the present novel with a lack of care. The novel is one of his longest and it follows the life of a young man, Anthony Patch, who has a modest trust and lives in New York. We follow his turbulent marriage, and the life of the couple outside New York in rural Connecticut. There is a tremendous variation in his writing. The first two novels, including the present, feature good prose. But, here he stumbles. This present book is probably his worst novel, but with so much variation in his work, you can also make a case for "The Last Tycoon" as being the worst; since, it ends abruptly at page 150 due to Fitzgerald's sudden death from a hearth attack.

Early parts of the book remind the reader of "This Side of Paradise" but the book goes off the rails from time to time in the story and the author insists on having short lectures on his point of view thrust into the novel. Those subtle lectures along with the turbulent plot - the chaos of the plot reflects his well known marital problems, the excessive drinking that lead to an early death, and a mentally ill wife Zelda - all taken together tend to ruin the book, or at least brings it down a notch. For that reason, the book was not a great success.

In his next major work, "The Great Gatsby," he pulls himself back from the chaos and presents a refined and polished short novel. Fitzgerald kept a diary, and he was fully aware that he had to put more work into his next novel and he was determined to make a comeback with "Gatsby."

Here we have excellent writing, beautiful prose, and an example of an early twentieth century American novel. It is mostly entertaining but a notch or two below his best work.

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