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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9781420931570
ISBN number: 1420931571
Label: Digireads.com
Manufacturer: Digireads.com
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 228
Printing Date: January 01, 2008
Publishing house: Digireads.com
Sale Popularity Level: 197294
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First published in Scribner's Magazine in 1922, 'The Beautiful and Damned' is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It is the story of Anthony Patch, a socialite and heir to a fortune, and his relationship with his wife Gloria. The novel addresses a theme common to Fitzgerald's work, that being the moral decline and directionless lethargy that had consumed the American upper class. A brilliant and tragic character study that explores the intricacies of married life, 'The Beautiful and Damned' is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's own relationship with his wife Zelda.
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Rated by buyers 
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and the Damned" was published in 1922 by Charles Scribner. It is written in a naturalistic style by the 26 year old author who had risen to fame due to his very first novel "This Side of Paradise." That novel chronicled the life of a Princeton man.
This long 450 page work deals with the lives of Anthony Patch a Harvard graduate who wastes his life. Anthony refuses to work depending on an inheritance from his wealthy grandfather. The grandfather lives in Terrytown New York where he is a pious prohibitionist who disdains the laziness of Anthony. Anthony fears he will be disinherited with granfather walks in on a wild, drunken party which Anthony is conducting at his summer home.
Anthony becomes infatuated with the Kansas City beauty the cold but regal Gloria Gilbert. She is based on Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. The two wed and party their way through California and New York. Gloria is self-centered, vain and selfish. She is a materialist who wishes to be worshipped as a glorious being of sublime beauty.
The Patch marriage is a disaster. They fight and spend money as if it were going out of style. Anthony's has to sell bonds to keep them afloat. He is drafted into the Army in World War I. He never goes overseas. Instead he is posted in a southern town where he has an affair with the dimwit belle Dot. He breaks off the affair when the war ends.
Meanwhile, Gloria has remained faithful to him during their separation. She does, however, resume friendships with former beaus who pass through New York in connection with their military assignments. Gloria is as cold as a cucumber and a demandiing hard to please person.
The marriage resumes following the armistice. Anthony briefly takes a job as a salesman but is a total disaster. He drinks and parties with disreputable characters falling down drunk in the street. Gloria can't abide him and does not want a child. Her belated attempts to enter the movies when she fails a screen test arranged by an old beau who has become a movie producer. She fears growing old as the lines across her face warn her that all beauty is ephemeral.
Both of these characters are lazy, mentally inactive crybabies. The novel ends when Anthony receives a thirty million bequest in his grandfather's will.
. Anthony and Gloria's romantic and emotional future is bleak though they are as rich as Croesus. The final scene portrays them sailing to Europe where one expects them to waste their days in gluttony, casual affairs and drinking to oblivion.
Fitzgerald based this novel on Zelda and his own dissolute lifestyle of wild carousing and boozing in America and abroad. He is able to use dialogue well and his poetic prose sparkles. After over eighty years the novel still holds interest due to the precise characterization of Anthony and Gloria, the prose and the ability to weave a plausible story of decline. These two characters are both beautiful and damned.
Rated by buyers -
I've probably read The Beautiful and Damned ten or more times--it is a very compelling story, although it also contains many annoying flaws. It, as others have stated, is somewhat verbose and seems as though it was not edited as heavily with Maxwell Perkins (as Gatsby later was.) The third person omniscient narrator is somewhat preachy--and obstructs much of the action, but there are passages of absolute brilliant, clear description of self-destruction and living in the moment. The narrative is almost bone-crushingly linear, as Gloria and Anthony fling themselves toward their inevitable, terrible fate. They "achieve" their notion of the American dream, in the end, but at a terrible cost to them both...
The topic and the structure of this book is echoed amazingly in Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream. The characters in that book also lose sight of the reality of their lives in their desperate pursuit of their "dreams." It would be interesting to know if Selby might have been inspired by this Fitzgerald novel. It certainly reads as if he did.
Rated by buyers -
Fitzgerald wrote this novel immediately before he wrote The Great Gatsby, to my mind to best American novel of the twentieth century. So I picked this book up with considerable interest. There are points in the book where Fitzgerald reaches some of the heights of Gatsby. The description of Patch's descent into alcoholism, his regrets and weird investment in his own nihilism and deterioration, and the extraordinary description of the dysfunctional co-dependency between Patch and his wife Gloria are truly great. This part of the book is riveting.
Also worthwhile is the humour and satire of the book, something that really is not present in Gatsby. While in some respects, the book pokes fun at everyone, including Patch's crusading reformer of a grandfather and his novelist friend Caramel, I don't think Fitzgerald is himself a cynic or nihilist. The descriptions of what Patch's more idealistic Harvard classmates do and Patch's transient regrets about his wasted life, clearly reflect the conventional moral lesson that Fitzgerald is trying to deliver: do good; make something of your life.
But the book is not in Gatsby's league, and Fitzgerald at this early point in his career (he's only 25) is still developing as a writer. The early chapters of the book are written with an irritatingly intrusive narration, and the reader must have patience to stick with the book. Fitzgerald seems to find his voice a third of the way through, and the novel then just takes off. The ending of the book is disappointing and contrived. It serves Fitzgerald's ironic purposes and digs at the idle rich, but it's not believable. Also, Fitzgerald does not understand the legal system that is at the heart of Patch's struggles and completely bungles his description of how the appellate process works. And the title of the book -- please. Couldn't he have come up with something better than that? It sounds like something his character Richard Caramel would use for one of his many bad novels. This book would have been much improved with editing or a rewrite.
In any event, a lesser work by Fitzgerald is a masterpiece by anyone else's standards. I recommend it.
Rated by buyers 
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At very first it is hard not to fall in love with Gloria Gilbert who, like all the self-besotted children of the heady and hedonistic Jazz Age, is so riotously frivolous, so ingenously self-centred. You excuse the fatuous languidness of her husband Anthony Patch as the transitory aimlessness of youth. But you know that these two have it coming when Gloria - in what FSF calls her "Nietszchean moment" - declares "I don't care about truth; I only want happiness!" While the rest of the Ivy League brahmins live out their dreams as writers and movie-makers, Gloria and Anthony squander their money and beauty on endless parties and clubs. At the end they are the flotsam of the Jazz Age. This tale strains at tragic grandeur without quite achieving it, chiefly because its two main protagonists remain essentially unlikeable, without any redeeming attribute that would stir our sympathy. The prose drips with lyricism, but it is without grace, poise and maturity. FSF was only 26 when it was very first published, and this book displays a raw diamond that would attain polish a little later.
Rated by buyers -
Fitzgerald's farce or satire on upper crust New Yorkers can only be described as being realty becoming greater than fiction. Proclaiming the story "was all true", Fitzgerald intimated that this book was something akin to a kiss-and-tell novel about what had happened within America's richest crowd during the time of World War I.
"Anthony, Maury, and Dick sent in their applications for officers' training-camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless; they chattered to each other, like college boys, of war's being the one excuse for, and justification of, the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible caste of officers, to be composed, it appeared, chiefly of the more attractive alumni of three or four eastern colleges."
Princetonian Fitzgerald created a Harvard protagonist Anthony Patch whose birth right is basically his only strong characteristic - at least so at the end of the novel. During his venerable youth, he locks eyes onto friend Rick's cousin, beautiful Gloria, whose unique spirit and vivaciousness make the self-described bachelour become betrothed.
The book follows the couple for a period of just less than a decade, during which time they fall into numerous elations, and depressions. This see-saw bipolar personality/lifestyle depiction is all-too-common in Fitzgerald's novels. Such was well accentuated in Fitzgerald's doctor and patient relationship in "Tender is the Night" as the patient is ultimately cured and the doctor falls into a deep feeling of desultory depression -- dipsomania. Another of Fitzgerald's common themes is of men chasing after beautiful women who make the boys feel blushing discomfiture. Well depicted here with Gloria as well as in "This Side of Paradise" and its Amory Blaine who constantly trips in his whirlwind attempts to conquer beautiful Rosalind (whose personality and looks mirror those of Gloria).
As the book progresses, you see the self esteem of Anthony deflate, while his wife amazingly awaits him to recover, by miracle or otherwise, and be the man she grew to love at the tender age of 22. Like "Tender is the Night", alcohol interferes with the person and with his relationships -- Anthony becomes a drunken "bore."
There are points of this book you have to think - is this a hypothetical autobiography. Had "Tender is the Night" bombed instead of won critical acclaim, would not Fitzgerald have fallen into the liquor bottle like Anthony? I am sure he wondered as such.
But, as sad as the book can be, Fitzgerald had times of folly and humor. Even a self-deprecating humor. He writes, in one discourse where the people talk disapprovingly about the new novels: "You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read `This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls really like that?"
Amazingly well written, and even more astonishing in that Fitzgerald was 25 years old when he wrote this novel, this book deserves its acclaim and infamy.
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