As you may know, Reader, I struggled to get through George Eliot's masterpiece (cue massive eyeroll) Middlemarch. Refer to my review for a detailed explanation, or just read the next sentence of this one. It was boring, basically. There isn't really a plot, it's just a description of some people going about their daily lives with nothing very dramatic ever happening. The same can be said of the plot (term is used loosely here) of The Beautiful and Damned: rich people are miserable, make poor marriage and life choices, continue to be miserable, the end. (I can't say with authority that that's how Middlemarch ends because I didn't finish it, but that's what happened in the first 500 pages) So, logically, I should have hated this book as much as I hated Eliot's. But I didn't, and I think I know why: Fitzgerald's characters are interesting, and their self-destruction is a lot more fascinating than the people at Middlemarch. In that one, Dodo and company were more like unsuspecting tourists wandering too close to the edge of a cliff, about to tumble over without ever knowing what hit them. Anthony and Gloria, the main characters in this book, take a different approach: they run, roaring drunk and screaming, right for the cliff's edge and never look back. It's much more compelling and amazing and sad, and I'm still going to be mean and give the book just three stars because I am adamant that good books should have plots, dammit. Also, I'm just going to say this and then hide from the Eliot fans' scorn and fury: Fitzgerald is a better writer. And he's funnier. Before you start flaming me in the comments about how I don't know what I'm talking about (well, DUH), I will present the following quotes from The Beautiful and Damned to support my claim:"A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash - the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spattered feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony's eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium.""In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!" - yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occupations being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. ...In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch - not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward - a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave."
Decades before the Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old” there was Fitzgerald and The Beautiful and Damned. For its two main characters 25 is middle aged and the curtain of old age drops rudely and irrevocably at 30. Fitzgerald, still in his mid-twenties when he wrote this novel of a young couple who burn the candle too brightly at one end, thinking romantically that it is both ends, knew, as Townsend did, that “getting old” was a mental state, not a chronological one. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert aren’t so metaphorical in their thinking. Youth is beauty and beauty is all and being rich greases the wheels of decline by allowing life to be a party as long as one can afford it. The one end they light is the alcoholic end of fast movement, talk, and drink, intended to brush back Death’s herald to the young, rich and spoiled: Boredom. They are easily bored not because the world is so, though they stand by its meaninglessness quite determinedly as a reasonable substitute for boredom, but because they are. In the end they are without ideas or argument. They have youth and a tragically ticking clock.The time of the novel is the second decade of the 20th century, which begins with them students, and continues into the years of the Great War, which they miss, and then on into the first years of the 20s, by which time they are in full decline, Anthony actually 30 and through almost all of his wealth, and Gloria approaching 30 and offended beyond words at being mistaken for 30. The Jazz Age is about to dawn, the Roaring Twenties about to roar, but these two are already washed up, desperately hoping for a contested will to deliver Anthony’s grandfather’s millions their way. Fitzgerald is not as polished or as succinctly brilliant as he will be in The Great Gatsby, but he impressively makes you care at least a little about two selfish people with little to recommend them beside their own sense of entitlement.His description of Manhattan is vivid, often poetic. The dialogue mostly sparkles. If you never quite develop full tragic empathy for the two main characters you do for Fitzgerald. It is a shockingly prescient description of his own descent into alcoholism, bankruptcy, and a mental breakdown. Anthony is always re-drawing the line of reform, when he will cut back on his drinking, their reckless spending and partying, their delayed consideration of meaningful employment. They and others recognize their self-destructiveness but they ignore each other’s warnings and feel betrayed by those of their friends. They fall from drinking for pleasure to drinking for escape to drinking for numbness, from parties at the Plaza to anonymous O’Neillian bars to their own empty apartment. It is a sad, glittery tale of two wasted lives but a tragic preview of a great novelist’s end.
What do You think about The Beautiful And Damned (2002)?
“Life just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”A reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald will not be surprised of the themes or characters they find in this book. We see Fitzgerald force his characters to deal with the things he could not resolve in his own life: the battle with writing, and the causes of his block, the ever-present spectre of infidelity, the loss of youth, and finally, mdness. The good:(+) This novel pretty much hits you over the head with its message, which is that people have to have some purpose in their lives (besides being rich and beautiful).(+) This is a well-written story. (+) The atmosphere of a decadent upper class is captured quite well. The bad:(-) The characters are terribly unsympathetic and I found myself not really caring what happened to them at the end.(-) This book is very long and could have been abridged and reached the same point. (-) The plot is familiar. The extremley long second novel of Fitzgerald explores many of the same questions that Fitzgerald probed in his first novel This Side of Paradise.All in all, I have a love/hate experience. Glad I read it, but also glad to finish it. However, it's by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the man can write.Favourite quotes: “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.”“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly…and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”“The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.”
—Desislava
I find it intriguing how in the title of this work FSF employs two adjectives used as substantive nouns, in a formulation known as hendiadys. Cf. "the sound and the fury," "by force and arms," and so many others. So it means something like "the Beautifully Damned." I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, much more than This Side of Paradise, FSF's first novel. While neither work exhibits the remarkable polish, symbolism, and tight (tragic) plot construction that is found in The Great Gatsby, this novel, published just three years before Gatsby, has much to recommend it. There are numerous passages of virtuoso brilliance, many of which approach and even exceed passages of similar lyrical beauty in Gatsby. FSF was a remarkably skilled writer whose lush prose is often packed with strikingly apt similes and rhapsodic descriptions of characters' emotional states. In the hands of a lesser writer (e.g., Thomas Wolfe), this kind of writing can run away into unrestrained silliness; with FSF, it is always carefully controlled and exquisitely executed.The novel's portrait of Gloria Gilbert is similar to, and yet far more richly textured and complete than that of Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby. She is a beautiful, shallow, selfish, and utterly narcissistic femme fatale. Her fixation on her waning youth is a major motif, as is her siren-like attractiveness to men -- from college undergrads to an older movie mogul. She is a fascinating study of a woman in a particular class and age, whose personality is anything but admirable. The protagonist, Anthony Patch, is similarly repugnant. He is an indolent, timid, dreamy-minded scion of a wealthy grandfather whose fortune he seeks to inherit. The marriage of these characters is clearly tinged with many autobiographical touches of Scott and Zelda themselves. Alcoholism is also a major theme of the book, and FSF actually explores with great intelligence and sensitivity the degree to which drink can destroy human beings.
—max
I didn't like this novel as well as the other Fitzgerald works I've read, though that's not to say that I didn't like it at all. It just seems too preachy and predictable at times. And as a warning, it's kind of heavy. You feel as though you're part of the downward spiral of the main character.The novel begins by briefly describing Anthony Patch's childhood and youth. As it moves into his time at college, it becomes more elaborate. Interestingly, Anthony does not seem like a character that will draw sympathy from an audience: he lacks ambition, we don't see him do much of anything to drive the plot, and something seems to be missing. His career is a perfect example of his character: he makes plans, tries something, and quickly gives up on it. The only thing he really does is to fall in love and marry Gloria. Then the story is essentially that of their downward spiral as they live frivilously and wait for Anthony's famous grandfather to make them heirs. By the time they do inherit his money, they are mere ghosts of their former selves. I'd recommend reading Fitzgerald's other novels before this one.
—Ashley
