This Side of Paradise -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think that I've mentioned this before, but I'm woefully under-read in classics--especially the American classics.  Like, pathetically under-read.  (Under-read?  Un-well-read?  Just plain ignorant?)  I've been working on it.  Up until pretty recently, the only Fitzgerald I'd read was The Great Gatsby--in high school.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed This Side of Paradise.  It didn't really feel like a traditional novel. At the beginning, especially, it felt like a series of vignettes--often pretty funny:

She fed him sections of the "Fetes Galantes" before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven.  One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother's apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy.  This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction.  Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her "line."

I love that: "succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction".  Some of the book felt so familiar and real--written differently, that passage could have been in any number of books by any number of authors.  At other times, Amory seemed almost alien to me--but I think that was due more to the time and the class than to the actual writing.

The "she" of the apricot cordial passage is Amory's mother, Beatrice.  She's a minor character--well, to the plot, not so much to Amory--but I'd read a whole book about her.  She's a character-and-a-half (not my picture of the ideal mother, but a great character nonetheless), but sadly, she isn't around much after the first few pages:

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother.  He had tutored occasionally--the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he had let off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape.  What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical.  However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier.  You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle.  There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him--in his underwear, so to speak.

It seemed like Fitzgerald was experimenting with different styles--as the book progressed and Amory aged, there was more and more poetry interspersed within the prose.  There was also an entire chapter in script format (which actually worked really well).  I'll definitely be reading more.