I enjoyed about half of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise.”  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first half, or the second half, or the middle half, but rather pieces here and there that added up to half.

That made for a bit of a slogging reading experience featuring times when I would get really into it and feel like we were building momentum, only to slam to a halt for a few chapters at a time.

The main character is a young man named Amory who embodies my frustrations.  It’s fun to follow as he plays out the fantasy in his head that he is a member of the elite, while in reality he has to actually put in some effort to get where he wants and he is absolutely, completely not interested in doing that.

“Oh it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory.  “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

The other half of the puzzle involves his pursuit of women — several main quests throughout the book — to which he applies the same kind of approach.  He is quick to crushes and to profess love, but putting in any kind of real work is not his thing.  So it goes that his relationships are fleeting, though built up as though eternal.

One of the women he is involved with elicited the one line in the book that I thought about for days after reading it.  Fitzgerald describes Rosalind during a break from his normal prose when he turns the story into a play.

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”

Aside from the obvious need to look out a bit for other people, I love this sentiment.  Handle what you need to for yourself, and don’t worry about what other people are doing.  It’s like the opposite of the mindset of someone who spends their days posting paragraphs of Facebook comments arguing with strangers.

I’ve read now three Fitzgerald books (The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned) and it’s easily a distant third place for me.  I think the stretches of Victorian poetry sealed that ranking for me, though I’m guessing a more contemporary audience enjoyed those parts just fine.  Still there’s no denying Fitzgerald can suck you back from a moment of boredom and hit you with a gorgeous line:

“He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her — she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.”