The Beautiful and Damned

So, I have just finished The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which, it has to be said, is not his best work, but nevertheless is wonderfully, beautifully, amazingly, marvelously  fabulously written. His main two characters, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, are about as flawed as any two human beings could be. They are drinkers (and at some point in the book, Anthony turns into a heavy alcoholic), thrifty and have no desire to understand each other whatsoever. They marry each other for what seems to be a temporary infatuation with each other. Poor old Anthony is head-over-heels in love with Gloria and is her obedient servant. He worships the very ground that she walks on, and her return for this is to treat him like any other man that she's been with. You start to feel sorry for him, until the one fateful night that Anthony's rich grandfather comes to visit. Not to give too much away, but he is their inheritance, and without him, and carrying on with the way they live life, they are broke without his money. And he needs to die soon or they are toast.

I thought that the characters were interesting, not very diverse, but interesting. Richard Caramel is the typical "I'm-a-writer" who has only written one good book and the others are trash; Joseph Bloeckman is the typical "older guy" who has been in the heroine's life; Maury Noble is, at first, the only different one, but becomes just like the other s when he cuts them dead in the street when they've fallen from their social pedestal. Basically, the book is an observation on society and the expectations that you must succumb to if you want to be viewed as, so to speak, aristocratic. Keeping in mind that this was set in the jazz age, and seeing as I don't know that much about it, Fitzgerald show you the good times and the bad times, whilst managing to keep the story in mind and weave in details of real life, but romanticising them for literary purposes. All in all, it was a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who liked The Great Gatsby! I'll be reading the Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging series next, so my next post will be when I've finished the series.