Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, Beautiful Fools, by R. Clifton Spargo, Careless People, by Sarah Churchill - review

The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature, like Pride and Prejudice, that appeals as much to the general reader as to the literary bod. It’ll always be around, if not as a movie (there have been five since its publication in 1926) then as an opera or a ballet. Last year a staged reading ran for weeks in the West End, to critical acclaim.

It is a short book — a long short story really — about wealth and sex and hope and disillusion and partying. These are the themes, too, of the lives of its author and his wife Zelda. Theirs was a relationship that continues to fascinate as powerfully as any fiction, and so has produced fictions to investigate it. After all, as Fitzgerald told his biographer Malcolm Cowley: ‘Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.’

There have always been Fitz novels (the first was Bud Schulberg’s The Disenchanted in 1950) and there are more to come this year. So what is the attraction? Well, there is something (for the novelist) providentially structured in the Fitzgeralds’ story, an inviting series of dualities and polarities. It takes place over two greatly contrasting decades, bookended by Scott’s own This Side of Paradise (1920) and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). What begins with Flappers, yellow automobiles, champagne and jazz ends in bums, freight cars, ruin and war.

The fate and fortune of the Fitzgeralds mirror this division, as they mirror each other, he dissolving into alcoholism, she into psychiatric chaos. Then there is the small-town America they both came from as against New York and Paris. And in Scott Fitzgerald himself there is the desire for fame and wealth and a self-disgust that accompanies that desire.