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wildbear 's review for:
The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fails to make significant the frivolous and banal, emotionally or thematically. Fitzgerald’s pen, hopelessly romantic, shallow in many ways, lends itself to a heightened reality—doomed romances and wistful nostalgia; icy beauty and ephemereal stardust; lost glory of youth both innocent and sinful—a playful mischief. But having to write pragmatically about actual relationships makes that pen of his most ineffectual. First book (or until they get married) is mostly good, everything after is mostly a bore (some good paragraphs notwithstanding), nearly 300 pages of feeble inheritance drama and the like. Though it does pick up a bit again at the camp (with a dalliance that is heavily reminiscent of that to Gatsby’s and Daisy's young trysts, and predictably Fitzgerald’s own). Reading a narrative where the endangerment of the riches of the idle rich serves as the chief component and propelling force is otherwise not fun or dramatically interesting. Sure, there is a thin irony to that corrosive pursuit of and blind faith in wealth as a means to happiness, but it fails me mostly as a baseline drama, and the melodramatic ambiguity of the ending feels like a hail mary. But hey, dude could really write; some incredible descriptions and romantic longings herein!
(Though perhaps my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt; if Roth’s assertion is to be held as a maxim, then I have failed in reading this novel 3.5 times.)
(Though perhaps my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt; if Roth’s assertion is to be held as a maxim, then I have failed in reading this novel 3.5 times.)