pnutbutterprincess 's review for:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.0

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This Side of Paradise follows the young life of Amory Blaine as he breaks from childhood and into the stage where one is being educated and is free to make decisions, but doesn't feel yet like an adult. Amory experiences many people from all walks of life; he experiences religion, rejection of religion, childishness, falling in and out of love, reckless living and careful living, and these people and experiences roll over him, yet all leaving some mark on his character. What is his conclusion from this vantage point, though? Does he become disillusioned with the hypocrisy and sameness of everything he sees, or does he realize in the end that life is a mess of all of these things and if it weren't so it wouldn't be life? Through Amory we get a view of Fitzgerald's young perspective, as he seems to see the world as a great cog of Time, spinning and running itself faster and broader. Amory seems to have been educated, but not prepared for the world, and he looks at the way it turns, and sees his generation turning itself over into a new generation of ambitious minds, and yet every other generation preceding has had the same ambition, and each turning in the end is a new variation on an old theme. Amory has lived youth and experienced youth, and the young Fitzgerald writing is perhaps asking the same question of the world as a somewhat jaded and lost Amory asks, "What now do I do with all I have learned and seen?"