Would it be wrong to compare F Scott Fitzgerald to Evelyn Waugh? Christopher Hitchens, in his brilliant essay, The Road to West Egg, wrote: “In its evocation, ‘The Great Gatsby’ is the American ‘Brideshead Revisited.’ Or perhaps one should say that Brideshead, produced two decades later, is the English Gatsby. In both novels young people are caught in a backwash of postwar blues and anomie, and everybody drinks too much. In both novels, too, the old order is visibly deteriorating, and an insecure yet grand mansion is a centerpiece. The dreaming spires of Oxford play a strange, background role in each, but the fictional foreground is filled with jazz and flappers and infidelity and brittle, amoral talk. Rex Mottram, Julia Flyte’s crude lover in Brideshead, is a newly rich and self-invented man from a shabby background, vulgar and ostentatious in his hospitality, suspected of crime and violence, and full of status anxiety. (I can’t find any evidence that Waugh ever read Gatsby, and he affected to disdain American writers, but still … )” I suppose one can say the same about the two brilliant authors of the Jazz Age. Both were, or so it seems, tired of the old world; both, like the rest of their generation, wanted something fresh. Fitzgerald and Waugh also had an element of sardonicism and pathos in their novels. ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ of course, is infinitely more luscious and longer than ‘The Great Gatsby.’ ‘This Side of Paradise’ was Fitzgerald’s first novel; after being rejected repeatedly and vigorously altering his work, he finally seduced the recalcitrant publishers to publish the work. It was an instant success. As a University Student, as I was reading this classic, I could not but compare myself to the protagonist, Anthony Blaine. I suppose, to be candid, we all are narcissists at this stage of our life; our personality and utterances dripping with dazzling egoism. Don’t we all think that we are going to be great philosophers or poets of the future? Anthony Blaine is such a character. The Great War, like his entire generation, metamorphosed him into someone entirely different. As his mentor writes to him in a letter, “This is the end of one thing: for better or for worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine I knew, never again will be meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew…” The ghastly G-World comes over and over again, not only in this novel but also in Fitzgerald’s other works (or Waugh’s, for that matter). As he succulently shimmers the following words at the end of this glittering novel: “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in the man shaken…” ‘This Side of Paradise’ is a novel that our narcissistic generation must read, and learn, and contemplate the future, but hopefully, our egoistic dreams shall never cease. After all, this is all we have got.

This novel was inspiring for the post-war generation because it promoted rebellion, youthful spirit and tons of intellectual ideas. However, for today's youth the novel would be slightly obselete. In terms of plot it was definately lacking, and the pace was somewhat slower than one might expect after reading "The Great Gatsby." It seems that Fitzgerald included everything (much in the fashion of HG Wells) and omitted nothing which was a flaw on his part. The different narrative and structural techniques were interesting however.

This is the first F. Scott Fitzgerald novel I have had the fortune of reading and I have a new favorite author as a result. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, eloquently and with great description. The story concerns the life and times of the romantic egoist Amory Blaine. It recounts the struggles of youth, the glory of self-absorbtion and centers on the confusion that the transition into adulthood often entails. Fitzgerald's narrative is exquisite. As an Everyman's Library edition, the book is put together fanastically with a cloth cover, silk page marker, and general attention to detail that is inherent to the Random House series.