Review: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished.

Now, I love me some F. Scott Fitzgerald. I zipped through The Great Gatsby , This Side of Paradise , and Tender is the Night – all three. But the only short story collection of his that I’ve tried, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories , had me snoozing before I finished the first story. Maybe because the tales are so long (they have 6 or 7 chapters apiece.) But when I happened upon the audiobook at my local library, I thought it must be a sign to give it another go. Here's my second appraisal.

The sentence-level writing is, of course, first-rate. But I think I identified the problem I’d been saddled with earlier: the collection is simply pretty boring. I found that I couldn’t really identify with the bulk of his characters- most of whom seem to be uppercrust, Mid-western, young men on the margins of high-society, who are in love with unattainable, snobbish girls. That kind of story is perfectly fine, and he’s done it well elsewhere, but I get bored with the repetitive nature of it.

Fitzgerald is said to have been conflicted over a lot of his stories. He felt like he was whoring himself out for a magazine paycheck rather than concentrating on producing his best work all the time. But I’m not going to dwell on the bad (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a highly-sensationalized, pulp-fiction tale that was hard for me to swallow) or the boring (see previous paragraph,) I’d rather talk about a couple I really liked.

“The Ice Palace” is all about cultural differences and assimilation between North and South in America. A southern girl dissatisfied with her sleepy, southern town, decides to marry a northerner. Her first foray into northern society as his fiancée raises some red flags for her and the tension builds slowly, but when she gets left behind and trapped in the labyrinth of a Winter Carnival ice palace, everything becomes clear, and she retreats to the South. Unlike some stories in the collection, things actually happen in this story— it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it packs enough emotional action to keep you thinking long after you’ve read it.

There were a couple others I enjoyed, but the title story is the coup de grace. “Babylon Revisited” is a brilliant, heart-wrenching tale that lays bare the wasteful decadence of the Jazz Age. In the aftermath of the market crash and too much out-of-control drinking and debauchery in Paris, Fitzgerald shows you the slow transformation and rehabilitation of the main character, who is ready at long last to take back custody of his daughter and to start a new life in Prague. That is, until some of his old friends come crashing in at the last minute to prove that there are some demons you can never quite get away from. It’s sad and brutal and wonderful. And the internet tells me it became the movie “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Most of this collection was just okay. I probably wouldn’t have crossed the finish line if some audiobook voice talent hadn’t read it to me. But those two stories really redeemed the collection for me. You may as well check’em out.

Feature Film Friday

Got a spare hour and 11 minutes this weekend? Then you might want to give this animated adaptation of Orwell’s  Animal Farm  a whirl. Enjoy:

What makes a reader?

And two posts turn into three.

Jonathan Franzen once penned a famous essay in Harper’s titled “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” There is a helluva lot to chew on in that article, but among them, there is also this smidgeon of empirical research on readers that I really found interesting.

“Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”—places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She road public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports (at least before the arrival of CNN). She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time.

“…her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been “heavily modeled” when he or she was very young.

“…According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest.

“…I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

“Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.

“…According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety.”

What They Were Reading: Jonathan Franzen

A continuation of yesterday’s theme, from The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction #207:

INTERVIEWER

What books were you reading in those years?

FRANZEN

Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.

But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else ­underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying ­everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. 

Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

    

Poet's Corner: "Fast Break" by Edward Hirsch

The Sweet Sixteen have come and gone, and the Elite Eight have been narrowed to a Final Four. We may have to wait a few more days to determine a champion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the roundball through a little poetry today, right? I had a hard time deciding whether to post the one below, which most of us can relate to as fans, or this one, which many of us relate to as sadly broken-down, hobbyist ballers. They're both great.

Fast Break

BY EDWARD HIRSCH

In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and

hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,

and for once our gangly starting center  

boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather  

from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike  

to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard  

scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor  

in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man  

letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly

like a coach’s drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court

the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving  

together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without  

a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out  

and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them  

in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently  

against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,  

inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion

for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur  

floating perfectly through the net.

Feature Film Friday

If you missed the American Masters episode on Margaret Mitchell yesterday, you can still tune in to PBS tonight to catch the one on Phillip Roth. Thanks to Tucker for the tip.

And speaking of things literary on television and in cinema, there’s a ton of free stuff out there that I’m going to start sharing over the next few weeks (-thus the title of this post.)

Did you know, for example, that some film-makers believe in a “curse of Quixote” that will undermine any efforts to adapt the novel on the silver screen? It’s a long enough book to discourage even the most ambitious directors, but it’s also a project that’s gotten the best of a couple who have tried: Orson Wells, for one, spent 20 unfruitful years on the quest, and Terry Gilliam flamed out some years later. This documentary chronicles the woes that beset Gilliam almost from the outset of his ill-fated efforts. The good stuff starts about 40 minutes in, when his first shooting location is harried by F16s and swept away in a flash flood. Enjoy:

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 12: Authors with Initials Edition

V.S Naipaul is a celebrated Trinidadian Indian, but those big jowls and heavy eyelids remind me a bit of old Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), a fictional American Indian. "Tatonka."

Here’s beloved chilldren’s author A.A. Milne and Ralph Fiennes. One gave us Winnie the Pooh, the other gave us Lord Voldemort.

With his low-set, bushy eyebrows and big ears, J.R.R. Tolkien isn’t a bad match for the Lloyd Bridges of “Hot Shots Part Deux” vintage.

And J.P. Donleavy’s earnest gaze seems to say, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” doesn’t it? Dead ringer for Alec Guiness.

It took me a long time to think of who T.S. Eliot reminded me of, but take a look at this side-by-side and tell me you’re not concocting theories about Rowan Atkinson being his love child.

Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth

Philip Roth has been making headlines recently by refusing to publish anything new (he has officially retired from writing.) But I couldn’t really add my voice  to the chorus of voices that are reacting to that news, because I’d never really read the man. That is, until I picked up Nemesis   a couple of weeks ago. So, what is my impression of Roth?

In truth, I don’t feel like my having read his 31^st and final novel gives me too much insight into this perennial Nobel contender. Roth’s got more prestigious awards than you can shake a stick at, and the only award Nemesis  was shortlisted for was the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, which happens to celebrate medicine in literature (the book concerns a war-time Polio epidemic.)

But I was wholly drawn into this story of a young playground director who finds himself battling the scourge of polio at home, while his best friends fight on the front lines of World War II.  What with the baseball backdrop, the overhanging shadow of war, and a New York-area Jewish youth wrestling with religious themes, the book felt like a fitting companion to Chaim Potok’s The Chosen , a book I absolutely loved. (Mr. Cantor? Mr. Galanter? Eh? Eh?) But unlike The Chosen , which ends up affirming religious faith, Nemesis  is the account of faith lost.

The book’s title is never really explained, but since the story unravels like a classic Greek tragedy, we can only assume that “Nemesis” signifies the Greek goddess of vengeful retribution, come in the form of the Polio virus. I’ve spoiled enough of the story as it is, but I’ll just say that Roth breathed enough life  into the time period and setting to make me want to check out some of his other work. You should, too.

Paris, by Time Machine

I just finished reading The Paris Wife  by Paula McLain, and not long before that, I tackled Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London , so I’ve had early 20^th century Paris on my mind lately (though that’s not rare around here.) Here is an interesting photo project comparing the Paris of our day with the Paris that would have been known by the famous  writers of the Lost Generation.

My first visit to Paris was as charming as I’d ever hoped it would be, but looking at these ‘before-and-after’s at Rue89, one can’t help but see that it’s lost just a little of its magic: