The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have been reading one good book after another lately and this one is no exemption. Unlike Tender is the Night which I found difficult to read, I found this book to be more accessible. I think I'll give Tender is the Night another shot just because I found The Beautiful and Damned so wonderfully (and frustratingly) engaging.

Much like Fitzgerald's other novels, this book is set in the Jazz Age. It centers around a couple, Anthony and Gloria, and their lavish lifestyle. From the beginning it is clear that both of these characters are marred with pride and indolence. They display a clear disdain in participating in any real way with the world except to criticize and look down on others. They even disparage the people around them who do engage with the world. This cynicism gradually leads to their fall from grace. By the end of the novel, they get the only thing they desire but are hardly able to enjoy it.

Somehow, this book looked through me and showed me the worst parts of myself. Anthony is comical in his misplaced pride and it forced me to look into myself. As someone who is also prone to bouts of cynicism, it was equal parts exasperating and eye-opening to see Anthony do absolutely nothing to change the course of his life. He desires something to light a fire in him but he refuses to look for it and, indeed, thinks the task of finding it beneath him.

He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness. The idea of eating alone frightened him; in preference he dined often with men he detested. Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of colour without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.
-If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do. It worried him to think that he was after all, a facile mediocrity, with neither the poise of Maury nor the enthusiasm of Dick. It seemed a tragedy to want nothing - and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was - some path of hope to lead him towards what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

Yet perhaps precisely because of his cynicism, Anthony is the perfect character to see through the farce of American society in the Jazz Age.

Lacking enthusiasm, he was capable of viewing the turmoil and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient striving towards an incomprehensible goal tangibly evidenced only by the ritual mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue.

Such, obviously, was the stuff of life - a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meager wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.
To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge. It was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom - so with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

It's very fitting that Anthony's life did end up following this observation but there is no satisfaction to be gained from it. Despite his ability to make astute observances, he remains unhappy and largely unsuccessful. 

I think I would like to read The Great Gatsby again. I remember it to be a much leaner and striking book than The Beautiful and Damned, which, is a little long-winded and slow to arrive at its point. It would be interesting to compare the two.