Jesse’s Reviews > The Beautiful and Damned > Status Update
Jesse
is 50% done
Anthony and Gloria falling in love and getting married is only a small portion of the story. Fitzgerald at this point gets into the crux of two people finding out how to live with each other, with squabbles and fights and sweetness. Some of the fights are petty, and some of them betray a masculine menace that Anthony embodies when he is tired of deferring to the mercurial Gloria’s whims (and also drunk).
— 8 hours, 24 min ago
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Jesse
is 33% done
A lot of this book is profoundly psychological insights into Anthony’s thought process in wooing women and being completely taken aback by Gloria’s refusal to adhere to the pathways in which he has tread. At this point the diary that Gloria reads through is one of my favorite sections, but of course it is liberally selected from (and without permission) the one Zelda actually kept…
— 12 hours, 43 min ago
Jesse
is 17% done
ngl, in my head this had always been “The Beautiful and THE Damned”. I am less partial to Anthony’s character as we don’t get the depth of background that exists in This Side of Paradise, but both characters were dominated by a loathing of the “ugly”. I do recognize that this again autobiographical novel is based on his courtship and marriage to Zelda, so it’s interesting here as well.
— 15 hours, 23 min ago
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8 hours, 22 min ago
Some of the bits are perfectly sentimental, like the detail of Gloria sleeping on the hotel bed with one of his shoes after being aware of the uniqueness of the moment of them leaving their first kind of “house” (on honeymoon).
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I’m amused with Dick, who is a fragment of Fitzgerald’s psyche, the writer who makes it big with his first novel and then makes his money with his new gravitas by selling short stories. Like, as far as plotting goes, it’s more damning to have Anthony and Gloria live beyond their means while being passionately in love while waiting for Anthony’s grandfather to die than portray Anthony as busting his ass as a writer to keep Gloria in extravagance. It’s more true to the sort of self-absorbed life that the two of them live as characters descended from F. Scott and Zelda.
