This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1896-1940)

Francis wrote Paradise in 1919 during a summer spent drinking in Minnesota, he was 22. That makes me want to go suck on an exhaust pipe. Seriously, this guy breaks up with Zelda, heads to St. Paul, gets Christmas Hammed on Martinis every night and he churns out a masterpiece which sets him on a path for literary greatness. Maybe the oppressive Nebraska humidity melted made me sweat all my potential away. Whatever the case, Paradise is pretty damn interesting.

Amory Blaine is our main character and by all accounts he's a doppleganger of Francis himself. Amory is spoiled from birth by a mother who wants him to be a societal charmer rather than a normal kid. He heads to Princeton and finds his way to fit in with all the preppy kids who generally go to Princeton. They carouse and live a privileged life on their campus and during their jaunts to Manhattan and other regional locales. One such drunken excursion ends in the death of a revered classmate on dark country roads. This incident haunts Amory for years. Our protagonist meets Isabelle and falls in love, but is rejected as the US enters WWI.

The war is treated as interlude, that is very lightly. The aftermath of the carnage is plain to see in the characters. Fitz may have cobbled together Paradise from previous shorter works. But the change in tone in the second half works beautifully. Instead of the smooth prose of the first book we get a dramatic form, just character lines to start book two. It is here we meet Amory's second love, Rosalind. Ros is pretty much a clone of Amory with one difference, she is rich and his fortune is pretty much shot. They fall for each other but she won't marry him (Can you plagiarize your own life? This is FSF and Zelda (Also who knew that's how you spell "plagiarize"?)). She ends up dumping him and marrying some rich guy. In the meantime Amory is looking for something to bring meaning to his life. There is discussion of religion, friendship, and loyalty. This is most prominent during a mess he got into with one of his buddies and a drunken floozie at a hotel. Instead of letting his friend take the fall for crossing state lines for immoral purposes with a girl, Amory takes the blame and is written up in the papers. 

As the novel ends we have a steadily increasing flow of Amory's poems and a feeling of his despondence. The war and the materialistic yearnings of Rosalind have disillusioned the poor kid. Amory leaves us with this sad line, "I know myself, but that is all-". 

Rating 8/10: I'm a sucker for anything in the 1910s. Here we see the makings of the preppie northeastern culture that has taken over today. If they made a film as a modern take on Paradise Vampire Weekend has to be the soundtrack. This is only the second FSF book I've read. I've also read four short stories (B. Button, The Ice Palace, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, and The Offshore Pirate). Gatsby is my least favorite of all these. I found that novel relatively bland and joyless compared to Paradise and the stories which pop with life. 

Rabbit, Run

John Updike (1932-2009)

Mr. Updike left us earlier this year and his death spurred me to jump into some of his work. Rabbit, Run is the first of the five part Rabbit series. What I found was perfect 1960 realism. The prose is descriptive without being flashy. The characters are painfully real. There are no good guys and bad guys, just people making mistakes and existing with their flaws in flawed world. Updike's use of the present tense is startling to the ear in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to understand how they are being startled.

Rabbit Angstrom is a former HS basketball star. He is drearily trudging home when he runs across a playground game and joins in, stroking a few jumpers before going back to his pregnant wife, Janice, and their son Nelson. The game is a bit awkward, a place where he can't return. He's only 26, but the glory he experienced in high school is long gone. His wife is pregnant and an alcoholic. His job, selling kitchen gadgets, isn't much fun. So one day he ditches his wife and drives away. He vaguely wants to head to the southern coast, but he barely gets out of Pennsylvania before turning around. He's the antithesis of the 1950s roadtrip character who roams the countryside, his roots are too strong. 

He goes to the only man who's lead him to his peak, his high school coach. Tothero, with vague hopes that the old man will guide him. Well, he guides him right into a date at a Chinese restaurant with a couple of prostitutes. He shacks up with Ruth, a wise, but lovelorn woman who makes love with Rabbit, but only slowly falls in love with him. They carry on a three month affair that again leads Rabbit nowhere because of his marriage and his jealousy about Ruth's former employment. 

Rabbit returns to his wife for the birth of their baby, and for a fleeting night feels the connection he felt with her during their sweetheart days. This feeling of being good again lasts until Janice returns home from the hospital. Rabbit's selfish desire for sex, perhaps an instinct to abuse Janice for her shortcomings (or his shortcomings) leads to Janice understandably rejecting him and his abandoning the family yet again. During Rabbit's absence Janice gets drunk and accidently drowns their baby girl. This leads to the final segment of the book.

Rabbit makes a scene at the funeral, insisting that the baby's death was not his fault. Once again he runs away, right to Ruth. Ruth initially rejects Rabbit, but eventually admits him and reveals that she's pregnant. As the book ends he heads out to grab some food. 

Rabbit could never find the comfort he found on the basketball court. He is constantly running but never really gets anywhere, in fact he manages to tie himself to Brewer, PA more completely. Religion is an important part of Rabbit, Run and this realm provides the two most interesting characters in the novel. The Eccleses are a reverend and his wife. Rev. Eccles is charged with getting Rabbit and Janice back together and seems to fall in love with Rabbit. It might not be romantic love (it might be) but Eccles becomes more committed to Eccles than his real family. His wife, Lucy, is my favorite character. She's disgusted by the time Eccles spends on other people's problems when it's quite obvious that the Eccles family has big problems itself. There is a strange energy that exists between Lucy and Rabbit. He feels a sense of control over her, and I don't know if she likes it, or even knows about his feelings, but she seems receptive to his advances. At one point she says he's full of life (contrast that to Ruth saying he spreads death). Lucy is also nonreligious, very interesting for a minister's wife.

Rating 7.5/10: I couldn't quite go 8. I might be too used to reading books that don't make you work so hard. Rabbit, Run requires a lot from the reader. The prose is jarring, the characters aren't really that likable and everything is tragically real. I bet if I read it again in ten years I'd like it even more.