text:       What is remarkable about this onetime best-selling book -- which could well be described as a coming-of-age-without-coming-of-age novel -- is not that Fitzgerald produced it when he was all of 24.  Nope, the amazing thing here is that the same writer produced "The Great Gatsby" a mere five years later.  
  
         "This Side of Paradise" is a mess: it is as uneven, affected, feebly pretentious and relentlessly immature as its hero, the tiresomely self-conscious young Minnesotan-gone-to-Princeton Amory Blaine.  (One suspects, in fact, that had Fitzgerald abandoned his muddled third-person narrative altogether and rendered the work instead as Amory's diary the result would have been considerably more readable -- or the book's structural and methodological flaws considerably more forgivable, at least.)
  
         That the novel was a roaring success upon publication in 1920 -- it was to prove the most popular book, in terms of sales, ever produced by its author -- presumably speaks to the public's recognition of something new and revealing in it.  Okay, Amory Blaine may well have been the original Jazz Age prototype; and the drinking and shameless smooching (etc.) that he and his prep school and Princeton friends indulge in at various points in the novel were probably, one can accept, a revelation to see in print (and likely a titillating one) for an American audience raised on McGuffy's Readers -- and ready for some sort of Great Departure after the Great War.  Welp, here it comes:
  
         "On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon, the `petting party.'
         None of the Victorian mothers-and most of the mothers were Victorian-had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed."
   
  To the reader at a remove of some 80-plus years this is, of course, very small beer.  What was alarming frankness in 1920 tends to read now, in the best cases of the Paradise narrative, as unalarming quaintness. While this is not exactly Fitzgerald's "fault", so to speak, it is also true that the use of "shocking revelations" of this type -- scandals specific to a place and time -- represents a risk a writer takes: the march of history may or may not reveal something lasting and/or universal in such episodes.  In any event, the price the reader pays here, in slogging through the meandering narrative which surrounds Amory's adventures in quaintness during the nascent Roaring Twenties, is very, very high for payoffs of such modest proportions.  I mean, come on: 
  
  "For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart.  The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he also lost the power of regretting it.  Eleanor was, say, the last time evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes."
  
  Yikes.  I don't care what New Generation you're talking about, can a flake-pounded soul really represent much of an innovation to anybody?  (Can it represent ANYTHING to anybody?)
  
         There are things to like, even admire, here and there in Paradise.  Fitzgerald gets off a few of the wonderfully epigrammatic lines that were to become a trademark (e.g., "They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered." "Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy." "It's better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.")  And the political incorrectness of some of the narrator's observations is, in its now-curious way, refreshingly, bracingly funny: 
  
  "Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed [which is about all Amory ever does-MHT], war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played.  Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basketball markings.  When Amory went to Washington the next weekend, he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens-Greeks, he guessed, or Russians."
  
  Nothing like a little wretched refuse to remind you there's a war on, I always say.  
  
         Anyway, most of the novel consists of young Amory's elaborate ponderings -- romantic, philosophical and egotistical -- which are as forgivable as they are forgettable.  I've forgotten them already. At some level, in any case, Fitzgerald himself had to recognize the ridiculousness of this pompous character -- who was, of course, a not-very-disguised version of himself.   For how else, if not as commendably self-deprecating irony, are we to take this observation? 
  
  "Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant.  Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his mother not to expect him, and sat in the train and thought about himself for thirty-six hours."
  
         In the end, in any event, one comes back to the initial Fitzgerald vs. Fitzgerald comparison with something like gaping wonder.  In Paradise almost nothing works: form, content, narrative stance, dialogue, character development, pacing -- you name it, it's a problem.  Yet in Gatsby, five years later, everything works -- everything.  If there is to be a Great American Novel, it will have to supplant Gatsby for the honor.  While it is hard to see how Fitzgerald got from point A to point B, the fact is that he did -- and without point A the journey could not have begun. So while "This Side of Paradise" hardly deserves a place in the national literary canon, it surely deserves our respect, and indeed our gratitude, for what it led to.
  