The Beautiful and Damned Classic Reprint F Scott Fitzgerald 9781440032738 Books
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Excerpt from The Beautiful and Damned
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 occasions 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.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. 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 inmiortality. 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.
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The Beautiful and Damned Classic Reprint F Scott Fitzgerald 9781440032738 Books
There's a reason F. Scott is one of the GOATs. What he can do in describing a dinner scene is greater than what most authors can do in their entire novels. The words here are beautiful, decadent, oozing style and grace and charm and sensuality in spades. While the pacing is often slow, when you realize that it was done deliberately you begin to enjoy the words upon words F. Scott uses to delve into the minutiae of these people's lives. Anthony and Gloria aren't exactly likable characters, and they weren't meant to be, but in watching their lives fall apart and their dreams become ever more deferred they do manage to extract a tiny bit of sympathy from the reader. If you have some time on your hands and enjoy a little bit of schaudenfreude, it's more than worth a read.Product details
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The Beautiful and Damned Classic Reprint F Scott Fitzgerald 9781440032738 Books Reviews
I first read The Beautiful and Damned when I was about fourteen, right after I had read my first Fitzgerald book, The Great Gatsby. And I was, of course, greatly disappointed; this is no Gatsby. I found the novel verbose and dull, and I couldn't relate at all to the two main characters, Anthony and Gloria Patch, a spineless rich boy married to a lazy, domineering, spoiled brat. They must surely be two of the least sympathetic characters in literary history.
Reading this novel again, almost forty years later, I found much more to appreciate about it than I did at first reading, but I finished it with a heavy heart, fervently wishing that a talented editor had taken an entire box of blue pencils to the manuscript.
One of the great literary achievements of "Gatsby" is its amazing economy of style; Fitzgerald stuffs an enormous amount of information into a very short book, without once leaving us feeling that something's been left out. (This is probably because Gatsby, alone among Fitzgerald's novels, began its literary life as a novella--a long short story--rather than as a novel. Fitzgerald literally pulled the original novella manuscript out of galley typesetting and expanded it into a novel.)
"Economy of style" is a description you certainly can't apply to The Beautiful and the Damned; it meanders all over the place, and it employs a hokey and odd literary device by turning some of the dialogue into actual dramatic scenes from a play, rather than prose. This device might have worked if Fitzgerald had used it throughout the book, but he doesn't; he drops the dramatic scenes after the early chapters of the book, and never re-uses them again. That just makes those scenes stand out even more awkwardly amid the regular prose.
The book also suffers very badly from the lack of sympathetic main characters. Of course, the whole point of the plot is that these people are awful, but we need **some** reason to keep reading their story. Again, if an editor had taken out his box of blue pencils, he might have noted on the manuscript that Anthony and (and especially) Gloria needed some kind of sympathetic counter-balance to their general, dual awfulness. Otherwise, why continue reading? There is a slight--very slight--sympathetic air attached to Anthony, whose main redeeming quality is his self-loathing; he knows he is awful and is ashamed of it, but is not strong enough to do anything about it. Gloria, on the other hand, has no clue that she is a greedy, incredibly selfish monster; she thinks her looks are the only thing she needs to offer up to the world in order to obtain all the "goodies" to which she feels entitled.
Despite these major flaws, the book is still worth reading for Fitzgerald's matchless prose, some of the prescient philosophizing (he rightly predicts the death of poetry as a literary art form, and for the correct reason, too) and the richly drawn tertiary characters, such as Tana, the Japanese houseboy, and Dot, the tragic Southern camp follower who falls hopelessly in love with Anthony. There is also something to be gained at pondering the lives and personalities of the Patches and realizing that most of us, no matter how flawed we think we are, are much better people than they are.
The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald's second book and is set in pre Jazz Age NYC. It is a dark and depressing story of the American aristocracy and nouveau-riche. The author writes a scathing commentary on society life and his tone is cynical and critical of nearly every character he introduces us to.
There is nothing redeeming about our two selfish and shallow protagonists, Anthony and Gloria. It's all about greed, manipulation, pettiness and depravity. If, as is thought, Gloria is based on Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, it's not a very flattering portrayal. Gloria is trading on her beauty and Anthony on his promised inheritance. I felt no sympathy for these two, who find themselves in dire straits due mostly to their hedonism and stupidity. Both are pathetic.
While there are very many well written passages, some parts of the novel seemed over long. The story did keep me guessing as it unfolded, but I anticipated a bad end to this well-matched couple well-matched in their extreme narcissism and lack of morale ethic.
Fitzgerald thoroughly convinced me there was nothing glamorous about the endless partying, resulting alcoholism and broken, useless lives of the Beautiful and Damned.
I enjoyed reading this novel for Fitzgerald's brilliant portrayal of broken and twisted characters who give into the Seven Deadly Sins, and their rewards. Fitzgerald's writing style in this book makes it apparent that he's still developing and honing his skill, yet it doesn't distract from the story. I really like "The Beautiful and Damned."
There's a reason F. Scott is one of the GOATs. What he can do in describing a dinner scene is greater than what most authors can do in their entire novels. The words here are beautiful, decadent, oozing style and grace and charm and sensuality in spades. While the pacing is often slow, when you realize that it was done deliberately you begin to enjoy the words upon words F. Scott uses to delve into the minutiae of these people's lives. Anthony and Gloria aren't exactly likable characters, and they weren't meant to be, but in watching their lives fall apart and their dreams become ever more deferred they do manage to extract a tiny bit of sympathy from the reader. If you have some time on your hands and enjoy a little bit of schaudenfreude, it's more than worth a read.
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