+ Pub W 98:661 S 18 ’20 280w
FITZGERALD, FRANCIS SCOTT KEY. This side of paradise. *$1.75 Scribner
20–6430
“It isn’t a story in the regular sense: There’s no beginning, except the beginning of Amory Blaine, born healthy, wealthy and extraordinarily good-looking, and by way of being spoiled by a restless mother whom he quaintly calls by her first name, Beatrice. There’s no middle to the story, except the eager fumbling at life of this same handsome boy, proud, cleanminded, born to conquer yet fumbling, at college and in love with Isabelle, then Clara, then Rosalind, then Eleanor. No end to the story except the closing picture of this same boy in his early twenties, a bit less confident about life, with ‘no God in his heart ... his ideas still in riot ... with the pain of memory ... he could not tell why the struggle was worth while,’ and yet ‘determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personality he had passed.’”—Pub W
Booklist 16:312 Je ’20
“In all its affectations, its cleverness, its occasional beauty, even its sometimes intentioned vulgarity and ensuing timidity, it so unites with the matter as to make the book a convincing chronicle of youth by youth.” M. E. Bailey
+ − Bookm 51:471 Je ’20 950w
“It is merely his way of doing things that makes his story different from multitudes of its kind. To say that in ‘This side of paradise’ Mr Fitzgerald has written a novel that will cause us to use a modern and expressive phrase, to sit up and take notice, is a mild expression of the feeling he arouses in us. He is a story teller with a courage of his own. Many will not like his novel, some will abhor it, but none can question the fact that he is a novelist with a message if not with a mission.”
+ − Boston Transcript p4 My 12 ’20 2000w