This Side of Paradise Summary: Fitzgerald's Debut Novel Explained
What it is about
This Side of Paradise was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in March 1920 after years of revision. It follows Amory Blaine, a handsome middle-class young man from the Midwest who is convinced he is destined for something remarkable without ever being able to say what. The book tracks him from preparatory school, where he plays quarterback, through four years at Princeton, into the army during the First World War, and out the other side into New York City.
Along the way Amory dabbles in literature, talks a great deal about himself, and falls in and out of love with a series of young women. None of the romances satisfy him. Fitzgerald takes the title from a line in Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, and the novel is less a conventional plot than a portrait of a generation's moral confusion. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the start of the Jazz Age, and it is particularly interested in how love gets warped by money and social ambition.
Fitzgerald was writing about the youth culture of the 1910s. The book was quickly and inaccurately absorbed into the image of the 1920s instead, and commentators credited him with being the first writer to turn the national spotlight on the younger generation.
The main characters
Amory Blaine is the centre of everything. He is self-absorbed, charming, intelligent and unsure what to do with any of it. His belief in his own great destiny is never matched by a plan.
Beatrice Blaine, his eccentric mother, is a figure he grows estranged from early. In her place he takes a mentor, Monsignor Thayer Darcy, a Catholic priest who becomes the closest thing Amory has to a moral anchor.
Three women shape the romantic spine of the book. Isabelle Borgé is a wealthy debutante Amory first met as a boy and falls for during a Christmas break in Minneapolis. Their romance runs on letters and collapses under his criticism of her. Rosalind Connage is a flapper, cruel and narcissistic, whom Amory meets in post-war New York. Eleanor Savage is a beautiful, reckless atheist he meets while visiting an uncle in Maryland, and she chafes against the religious conformity and the limits placed on women in Wilsonian America.
Dawson Ryder is the rival. He has wealth and status, the two things Amory lacks.
The themes
Ambition without direction is the engine of the book. Amory wants greatness but has no craft, no cause and no discipline. When his family fortune evaporates in failed investments while he is serving overseas, the gap between his self-image and his circumstances becomes impossible to ignore.
Love and money are inseparable here. Amory takes a job at an advertising agency out of desperation and hates it. Rosalind weighs him against a richer man and chooses the richer man. The novel is blunt about the fact that romance in this world is also a transaction.
Identity is the third strand. Amory is constantly trying on positions, including a half-formed enthusiasm for socialism that he admits he is still working out even as he argues for it. Faith and its loss run underneath all of it, from Monsignor Darcy's influence to Eleanor's defiant atheism.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. Rejected by Rosalind, Amory quits his job and drinks heavily until Prohibition begins. He then learns that Rosalind is engaged to Dawson Ryder and declares her dead to him. Monsignor Darcy dies, which deepens his despair. Homeless, he travels from New York towards Princeton, arguing politics with two men who give him a lift and who both reject his views. Approaching Princeton, he admits his own selfishness and his overindulgence in drink and beauty. Wandering a graveyard at twilight, he thinks about mortality and about the generation to come, inheriting disillusionment and lost faith while still chasing love and success. He ends standing beneath Princeton's gothic towers, arms outstretched, saying: "I know myself . . . but that is all."
Why it still matters
The book was a sensation. Reviewers hailed it as an outstanding debut, it ran to twelve printings and sold 49,075 copies. It did not make Fitzgerald rich and it was not among the ten best-selling novels of the year, but it made the 23-year-old author a household name overnight. He could suddenly command higher rates for his short stories, and the improved prospects persuaded Zelda Sayre to marry him.
It also made him a target. The press cast him as the standard-bearer for youth in revolt, and reactionary figures denounced him as the chief aggressor in the rebellion of flaming youth against the old guard. When he died in 1940, some social conservatives rejoiced, and the Baltimore Diocese refused his family permission to bury him at St. Mary's Church in Rockville, Maryland.
Read it for the first draft of everything Fitzgerald would later do better, and for a young man's account of wanting a great deal and knowing almost nothing.
