Posted by Steven on 12/12/2007, 23:53:50
76.187.106.26
We let this one go by in October without much notice, so I thought - better late than never - I'd offer up my observations for discussion:
Knowing the author's background can color your interpretation of a book. In this case, knowing that Fitzgerald was just 23 and that it was his first book, I kept seeing signs of the author's immaturity and pretentiousness as I was reading it. Whether that would have been my impression had I not known in advance how young he was... In any event, I thought he occasionally let style take precedence over substance, and that his rattling off of other literary figures - often in a derogatory sense - was a bit showy. His principal character puts down Joyce's Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, giving most of his praise to Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata.
In any event, there are really two themes to this novel: a semi-autobiographical portrait of a young man, and a real-time portrait of an emerging culture. In the latter, I believe, is where This Side of Paradise made and deserves its reputation. What a change from the stiff and prudish world of just a few years earlier that Edith Wharton depicted!
One thing that struck me was that at least three of the young women characters either said they wished they had been born male or were described as masculine. This is perfectly in accord with the fashions of the 1920s when women went for the short-haired, flat-chested masculine look.
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