Like "The Great Gatsby", "The Beautiful and Damned" is a novel about America and explores social themes like decadence, morality, relationships, marriages, and american society in the 1920s.
The foreword explains that this novel is largely autobiographical in nature, modeled after Fitzgerald's own relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald, and is incarnated by the 2 protaganists Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, in the novel. Anthony is the heir presumptive to a large fortune which he thereotically will come into after the passing of his grandfather, the great reformer Adam Patch. In my opinion, this expectation of coming into a fortune is to be his undoing, as he flits from one meaningless existence to another, never seriously making much of his life. In his wastrel existence, Anthony is the very antithesis of Adam Patch -- the latter a self-made, rigid man driven by his passion to reform and annihilate the excesses of society -- and he embodies all the very destructive elements that his grand-pater is striving to overcome.
Throughout his life, Anthony lives for the moment. One day he meets Gloria and the two fall in love before eventually getting married. Sharing a common love of parties, booze and spending money, Anthony and Gloria also abhor responsibility and go to great lengths to avoid thinking about it, even if it is to their very detriment. In the first few years of their marriage, they spend beyond their means, make wrong investments and whittle away what little money they have, always postponing accountability to the next day.
Matters come to a head one day when Adam Patch walks in on one of their numerous scenes of dissipation, and in his death, disowns them without leaving a sou to their name. Not surprisingly the couple decided to contest the will. The outcome of the legal battle was to last a few years, with Anthony leaving to go to war in the interim. At the close of the story, he cuts a sorry figure as a character fully in the grip of alcohol addiction. Just in case you are wondering, he did win the lawsuit, but I think it matters little.
Frankly I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed the book, which for me is a trifle too long. Then again it could also be because I was never partial to American Literature -- notwithstanding the fact that I probably have this genre to thank for for my exemplary English grade in school -- with its melancholic, "one-hero straining to find his own identity in the midst of society" type of moralising.
Be that as it may, I do think there are areas of interest that have the capacity to set one thinking within this book. At the broad level, the depiction of American society in the jazz age with its wastes, excesses and a society's search for a moral conscience is one; one can also look at the relationship angle and either explore the richness of how Fitzgerald has portrayed the inter-relationships of the characters or how art has closely mirrored this fictional world by comparing Anthony and Gloria to his own relationship with Zelda. Further, one can also enjoy the particular genius of Fitzgerald in skillfully combining out-and-out hedonism and cowardly inertia in one character. The latter is the mould I am inclined to see the story cast in, and because of that, my reactions towards the book are ambivalent. For Anthony is not the prototype of the proverbial hero, but neither is he a villain. He is simply a flawed man with his weaknesses thrown into sharp relief by being cast as the main character in this book. To top it off, there is no closure at the end of the story, merely a sad figure of a man who seems destined to continue living out the rest of his days as an empty shell.
Depressing.
Geek Rating: 3 out of 5
The foreword explains that this novel is largely autobiographical in nature, modeled after Fitzgerald's own relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald, and is incarnated by the 2 protaganists Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, in the novel. Anthony is the heir presumptive to a large fortune which he thereotically will come into after the passing of his grandfather, the great reformer Adam Patch. In my opinion, this expectation of coming into a fortune is to be his undoing, as he flits from one meaningless existence to another, never seriously making much of his life. In his wastrel existence, Anthony is the very antithesis of Adam Patch -- the latter a self-made, rigid man driven by his passion to reform and annihilate the excesses of society -- and he embodies all the very destructive elements that his grand-pater is striving to overcome.
Throughout his life, Anthony lives for the moment. One day he meets Gloria and the two fall in love before eventually getting married. Sharing a common love of parties, booze and spending money, Anthony and Gloria also abhor responsibility and go to great lengths to avoid thinking about it, even if it is to their very detriment. In the first few years of their marriage, they spend beyond their means, make wrong investments and whittle away what little money they have, always postponing accountability to the next day.
Matters come to a head one day when Adam Patch walks in on one of their numerous scenes of dissipation, and in his death, disowns them without leaving a sou to their name. Not surprisingly the couple decided to contest the will. The outcome of the legal battle was to last a few years, with Anthony leaving to go to war in the interim. At the close of the story, he cuts a sorry figure as a character fully in the grip of alcohol addiction. Just in case you are wondering, he did win the lawsuit, but I think it matters little.
Frankly I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed the book, which for me is a trifle too long. Then again it could also be because I was never partial to American Literature -- notwithstanding the fact that I probably have this genre to thank for for my exemplary English grade in school -- with its melancholic, "one-hero straining to find his own identity in the midst of society" type of moralising.
Be that as it may, I do think there are areas of interest that have the capacity to set one thinking within this book. At the broad level, the depiction of American society in the jazz age with its wastes, excesses and a society's search for a moral conscience is one; one can also look at the relationship angle and either explore the richness of how Fitzgerald has portrayed the inter-relationships of the characters or how art has closely mirrored this fictional world by comparing Anthony and Gloria to his own relationship with Zelda. Further, one can also enjoy the particular genius of Fitzgerald in skillfully combining out-and-out hedonism and cowardly inertia in one character. The latter is the mould I am inclined to see the story cast in, and because of that, my reactions towards the book are ambivalent. For Anthony is not the prototype of the proverbial hero, but neither is he a villain. He is simply a flawed man with his weaknesses thrown into sharp relief by being cast as the main character in this book. To top it off, there is no closure at the end of the story, merely a sad figure of a man who seems destined to continue living out the rest of his days as an empty shell.
Depressing.
Geek Rating: 3 out of 5
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