F. Scott Fitzgerald's turbulent decline well-portrayed
In a departure from his 14 previous novels, Stewart O'Nan has chosen F. Scott Fitzgerald as the protagonist of his current work, West of Sunset.
West of Sunset
By Stewart O'Nan
Viking 289 pp. $27.95
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Reviewed by Katherine Bailey
In a departure from his 14 previous novels, Stewart O'Nan has chosen F. Scott Fitzgerald as the protagonist of his current work, West of Sunset.
The O'Nan/Fitzgerald combination proves remarkably fitting. One of our foremost novelists is writing about a literary icon, author of The Great Gatsby, no less. Just as O'Nan succeeded in drawing readers inside the heads of such ordinary people as the elderly widow Emily in Emily Alone, or Manny DeLeon, the hapless chain-restaurant manager in Last Night at the Lobster, he inhabits Fitzgerald's very being and authentically depicts the writer's fluctuating mind-sets during the final years of his life. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 at 44.
Because Fitzgerald's alcoholism defines his life, it serves as a tenacious undercurrent to O'Nan's story. Yet it is the portrayal of Fitzgerald's turbulent relationships with his wife, Zelda, from whom he lives apart, and with the attractive gossip columnist and Hollywood celebrity, Sheilah Graham, that gives the novel coherence and is O'Nan's primary achievement. Another strong point is the use of flashbacks. In anecdotes from the pre-Zelda years, we observe Fitzgerald as a child growing up - unhappily, for the most part - in St. Paul, Minn.; as an injudicious Princeton undergrad; and as a young man smitten with the beautiful Ginevra.
By the time the novel opens in 1937, Fitzgerald's literary prominence and Jazz Age glamour days are long over. "Together," writes O'Nan of Fitzgerald and Zelda, "in another age, they'd been famous for their fashionable trespasses, the stuff of magazine covers and scandal sheets . . . ."
Despite all they'd squandered, Fitzgerald would never dispute that he and Zelda "were made for each other." Because Zelda, diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930, has by the time of the novel for years resided in a mental hospital near Asheville, N.C., she and her husband experience only fleeting interactions. "How expert she was," declares O'Nan, "in wielding her helplessness."
To pay Zelda's hospital bills and their daughter's exorbitant school fees, Fitzgerald once again turns to writing movie scripts. In depicting Fitzgerald's working days at major Hollywood studios, O'Nan treats readers to cameo appearances by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and Humphrey Bogart. Skillfully, he weaves these celebrities into the action of the story.
While it's true that readers of West of Sunset witness the disintegration of an American legend, at the same time they experience an intimate portrayal of a flawed man who never gave up - even as his endeavors, large and small, were consistently thwarted.
AUTHORS EVENT
Stewart O'Nan: "West of Sunset" and Peter Carey: "Amnesia"
7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine Streets. Free admission.
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