This is the seventh edition of the Baltimore Book Club. Approximately every six weeks, we meet--we are a group of six--at the home of a member and discuss a book over a meal of good food and wine. As I informed readers in my review of "The Blue Angel," by Francine Prose, posted on 12/23/2015, our choice for the 1/4/2016 meeting was F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." A few days after each meeting, I post a review of the work most recently discussed. Our next selection, (we will meet on 3/10/2016), is "The Notebook of Maya" ("El Cuaderno de Maya"--some of us will be reading it in the original Spanish) by Isabel Allende. We invite cyberspace members to read the book along with us, and to provide comments once the online review is posted.
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner, New York, 1934, 1982
315 pages
"Tender Is the Night" is one of the greatest American novels ever written. It has been widely reviewed and commented upon; we decided that it would be a bit presumptuous to post another one. We will therefore provide a very brief summary and discuss the novel from a novel angle, which we call that of The Clever Contemporary--we will explain.
The novel has a dual purpose. One is to portray the life of the fantastically wealthy during the gilded age, the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The other is to tell a good story, full of well-depicted characters and their interactions. Fitzgerald triumphs on both accounts. The central plot of the book is the moral and social disintegration of Dick Diver, a brilliant psychoanalyst. At the outset, the dapper, widely admired, high-living doctor is the center of attention, idolized by almost everyone. His basic problem is an inordinate need to be loved and a limited ability to love. When the women in his life, his wife Nicole, and the young actress Rosemary Hoyt, no longer need him, he rapidly descends into alcoholism. Nicole divorces him and remarries. Far from the high-life of wealthy American expatriates in France, he winds up in obscurity as an unstable country doctor in upstate New York.
So much for summary; we will now proceed with our analysis under the rubric of "The Clever Contemporary." In 1947, Rudolf K. Goldschimdt-Jenner published a wonderful little book entitled, "Der Kluge Zeitgenosse, Fehl-Urteile der Kritik," ("The Clever Contemporary, Faulty Judgments of Critics.") We don't have to give examples of unwarrented put-downs from German literature, English literature has many examples as well: Emily Dickinson's poetry was not appreciated during her lifetime; a contemporary critic of Keats, one of the foremost poets of the English language, found his poetry to be nothing more than "imperturbable drivelling idiocy."
We are certainly not going to be so harsh in our judgement of outdated notions that enjoyed wide currency in Fitzgerald's time, which albeit tempered by the alembics of genius, still found their way into the novel. Our criticism will be more in accord with an essay I wrote long ago, "The Folly of Our Times," in which I asserted--and still assert--that important truths are missed by previous generations only to become obvious truths in the future, much as one is blind to a large portion of ambient light while wearing polarized glasses. (An example: the--relatively--enlightened Thomas Jefferson "owned" slaves.) Let us now turn our discussion to such follies in the novel, which were widely accepted when "Tender Is the Night" was being written in the 1920s, (it was first published in 1934).
1. The Clever Contemporary: No more Wars
The first section of the novel takes place in France, where Nicole and Dick are living in style with a wealthy set of friends and acquaintances, consisting mostly of American expatriates. They visit an area that was roiled by intense carnage during World War I, which had ended only five years earlier. Dick Diver says the following to Rosemary Hoyt, with whom he is falling in love:
"See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rags. No European will ever do that again in this generation."
--page 57
Fifteen years later the bloodiest and most horrible war in history began.
Dick goes on to explain why a European war is no longer possible. We sadly shake our heads in disbelief while reading this pathetically unprescient view of a clever, albeit fictional, contemporary of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was not being ironic; he wrote this at a time when the trauma of the First World War was quite fresh. How could civilized people be so stupid as to choose war again? A good question. Unfortunately, they were soon to behave in an abominably uncivilized fashion, as we now know only too well.
2. The Clever Contemporary: Homosexuality is Evil
Dick, a psychiatrist at a prestigious Swiss clinic, receives a visit from a wealthy merchant from South America who is greatly upset due to the "moral corruption" of his twenty-year old son:
"I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow; he was corrupt at King's College, Cambridge. He's incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work, but the result was nothing. Finally last week...I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip."
--page 244
Dick finds the boy to be "handsome and alert," that is, quite intelligent and perky. Dick asks him which came first, the drinking or the "abnormality." The boy responds as follows:
"I think the drinking is caused by the other." He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, "It's hopeless. At King's I was known as the Queen of Chilli (Chile). The trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated at the sight of a woman."
--page 244
Dick talks "pleasantly" with the intelligent young man for about an hour. "It was as close as Dick had ever come to understanding such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetuate his outrages..."
Dick advises the unhappy young man as follows: "It's a hole-and-corner business at best," Dick told him...If you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it."
--page 245
Times have changed, and, in this regard, definitely for the better. The greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality is, however, fairly recent. When I was in medical school, in the late 1960s, I remember a psychiatry lecture I attended. It took place in a conference room that accommodated about 20 students. The psychiatrist who gave the talk was, I thought then, ancient--but was probably no older then than I am now. He suffered from a progressive neurological disease, however, and reached his seat with great difficulty. He also had a rather marked tremor in both hands. He was quite stern as was his wife who accompanied him. (She knitted throughout the session with a grim expression on her face, without saying a word; she reminded me of Madame Defarge.) The doctor asserted that homosexuality was a grave mental and moral illness. He commented that W.H. Auden was indeed a great poet, but was quite mentally ill due to his alleged deviant orientation. What bullshit, I thought, but kept silent, as did everyone else--most of whom probably were in agreement with the decrepit expert, whom I nicknamed "The Not-So-Grand Inquisitor." His view of homosexuality, however, had wide currency at the time. But not for long: The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. Progress was slow at first, but steadier ever since. Who in my graduating class of 1972 could have imagined that gay marriage would be legal in the United States four decades later? I certainly didn't.
The encounter between Francisco and Dick is, I think, quite subtle. Dick is a "clever contemporary," but not exclusively so. He realizes that the young' man's sexual orientation would not be altered by therapy or by willpower, which was a progressive view at the time. Dick views homosexuality as a disorder much like drinking--it is not a "sin" but must be controlled--a view that is no longer appropriate today, although it is, sadly, still the official position of the Catholic Church. Dick, obviously, is promoting a double standard: if Francisco had been "sleeping around" with women while at college, he probably would have gotten a pat on the back. Activity that is viewed in one case as "sowing one's oats" is in the other case considered to be scandalous, even though the oats, albeit sowed in different fields, are exactly the same. The idea that Francisco might eventually fall in love and have a stable, loving relationship with a man was not a thought that ever crossed Dick's mind--oh, the folly of the times! Dick, a charmer himself, is, however, undeniably captivated by Francisco's winsome personality.
Fitzgerald portrays Dick, a character based on himself, as biased here, but much less biased than the homophobic zeitgeist of the times. Fitzgerald as the omniscient narrator presents, however, a much subtler picture. Francisco's father considers his son to be a horrible pervert. The narrator presents him as a intelligent vivacious individual of considerable charm. The implication is that the problem is with the father, and, to a less degree, with Dick. If Fitzgerald's position had been more in accord with the father, Francisco's personality would have most likely been colored with a much darker brush. The very understated implication is that Francisco is normal. Such a view was scandalous in the 20s. It is a tribute to Fitzgerald that he implied, albeit subtlety, that the scandal was homophobia, not homosexuality. He was able to laugh, albeit almost inaudibly, at one of the follies of his time.
3. The Clever Contemporary: Women are this and thats while Men are Thats and Thises
Although gender roles were changing rapidly at the time "Tender Is the Night" was written, the untamed lions of patriarchy were still roaring during the roaring twenties. Proud male lions were still very much in control of the pride, even though, in the wilds of Western civilization as in the wilds of Africa, lionesses did much of the work. Fitzgerald did not entirely escape this rebarbative jungle, as the following passage from the book demonstrates:
He (Dick) saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speer's plans--and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such "man-made" crimes as "cruelty." So long as their shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Seers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary's being damaged--or was she certain that she couldn't be?
--page 163
Before I discuss the gender issue, I would like to bring to the reader's attention two characteristics of Fitzgerald's writing, which are very much present here, as they are on just about every page of the book: remarkable psychological depth and a lyrical, figurative style of expression that is as beautiful as it is apt. "The pension on which her own emotions had retired" and "their shuffle of love and pain..within proper walls" are fine examples of the latter.
The above-quoted passage contains a fine example of the former as well. The fictive Mrs. Speers rivals the all-too-real mother of Judy Garland in her ambition for her daughter. She encourages her daughter, Rosemary Hoyt, now a young actress, to have an affair with Dick not with a goal of permanent relationship in mind, but in order to get more experience and become more sophisticated. Fitzgerald, always the good psychologist, convincingly portrays her as a ruthlessly ambitious women, who, thwarted in her own life, transfers her insatiable desires onto her daughter. Most of us have encountered persons like Mrs. Speers during the course of our lives; only about half of them, however, can flaunt a beard. Fitzgerald's error, a folly of his time now apparent to us all, is that he partially excuses Mrs. Speers's behavior because, well, that's the way women are.
I call this the Oedipal Fallacy, that is, attributing to nature what is attributable to nurture. Freud believed that the oedipal complex was an inevitable part of human nature. In his day, the women raised the children with love and acceptance; the distant fathers provided the discipline. In our day, many fathers are close to their kids; when fathers "mommy" the oedipal complex thrives as well as an oak tree thrives in the desert--that is, not at all. That women, thwarted in their ambitions, sometime behave like Mrs. Speers, is not due to the intrinsic nature of women, but due to extrinsic pressures of a society which demanded that female wings, as it were, must always be worn in a lady-like fashion, that is, clipped.
Fitzgerald, however, was not a male lion asleep in the jungle while his females prowled. We have seen that his views on homosexuality were hardly those of a fundamentalist; similarly, Fitzgerald's women are far more formidable than the cardboard cuties whom the zeitgeist of the times espoused. One shouldn't forget that Mrs. Speers's ambitions were centered on a daughter, who, despite the former's potentially damaging interventions, became a successful, self-assured woman, whose inner pockets were as full of empathy as her outer pockets--not in pants, but in a pocketbook--were full of cash.
Am I exaggerating when I consider Fitzgerald to be a proto-feminist? Perhaps, but just as in Lake Wobegone, all the women in the novel tend to be strong; the men, in contrast, tend to be weaker. For instance, Dick, who had everything handed to him, succumbs to his own narcissism. Nicole, who had everything taken away from her when her monstrous father sexually abused her, understandably descends into mental illness. Yet her inner strength eventually triumphs. By the end of the book, her assertiveness is the foil for her husband's passivity.
Weak men and strong women appear throughout the book. For instance, Abe North, who, as a musician, has apparently been permanently diverted from the Yellow-Brick Road of Early Promise to the Dun-Stone Path of Ongoing Lack of Success, becomes an alcoholic and suffers a shameful death in a speakeasy. Another instance: the fantastically wealthy Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is indeed a monster, but a very powerful one.
The fiction of male superiority is more apparent than real in Fitzgerald's transcendent fiction. Although not immune from follies of his time, the omniscient narrator of this novel, that is, Fitzgerald himself, possessed great insight into the human condition. Not only that, Fitzgerald has given us perhaps the greatest portrait of the Jazz Age in fiction; not only that, he accomplishes this with the creation of a story replete with human, perhaps all-too-human, vivid characters, that hasn't lost its ability to amaze and delight almost a century later, and, presumably, for centuries to come.
*
We invite you to become a cyberspace member of our club. In addition, we welcome any comments you may have. We also invite you to read Allende's "The Notebook of Maya" in preparation for the eighth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. In the meantime, we wish you quiet hours of contended reading.
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner, New York, 1934, 1982
315 pages
"Tender Is the Night" is one of the greatest American novels ever written. It has been widely reviewed and commented upon; we decided that it would be a bit presumptuous to post another one. We will therefore provide a very brief summary and discuss the novel from a novel angle, which we call that of The Clever Contemporary--we will explain.
The novel has a dual purpose. One is to portray the life of the fantastically wealthy during the gilded age, the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The other is to tell a good story, full of well-depicted characters and their interactions. Fitzgerald triumphs on both accounts. The central plot of the book is the moral and social disintegration of Dick Diver, a brilliant psychoanalyst. At the outset, the dapper, widely admired, high-living doctor is the center of attention, idolized by almost everyone. His basic problem is an inordinate need to be loved and a limited ability to love. When the women in his life, his wife Nicole, and the young actress Rosemary Hoyt, no longer need him, he rapidly descends into alcoholism. Nicole divorces him and remarries. Far from the high-life of wealthy American expatriates in France, he winds up in obscurity as an unstable country doctor in upstate New York.
So much for summary; we will now proceed with our analysis under the rubric of "The Clever Contemporary." In 1947, Rudolf K. Goldschimdt-Jenner published a wonderful little book entitled, "Der Kluge Zeitgenosse, Fehl-Urteile der Kritik," ("The Clever Contemporary, Faulty Judgments of Critics.") We don't have to give examples of unwarrented put-downs from German literature, English literature has many examples as well: Emily Dickinson's poetry was not appreciated during her lifetime; a contemporary critic of Keats, one of the foremost poets of the English language, found his poetry to be nothing more than "imperturbable drivelling idiocy."
We are certainly not going to be so harsh in our judgement of outdated notions that enjoyed wide currency in Fitzgerald's time, which albeit tempered by the alembics of genius, still found their way into the novel. Our criticism will be more in accord with an essay I wrote long ago, "The Folly of Our Times," in which I asserted--and still assert--that important truths are missed by previous generations only to become obvious truths in the future, much as one is blind to a large portion of ambient light while wearing polarized glasses. (An example: the--relatively--enlightened Thomas Jefferson "owned" slaves.) Let us now turn our discussion to such follies in the novel, which were widely accepted when "Tender Is the Night" was being written in the 1920s, (it was first published in 1934).
1. The Clever Contemporary: No more Wars
The first section of the novel takes place in France, where Nicole and Dick are living in style with a wealthy set of friends and acquaintances, consisting mostly of American expatriates. They visit an area that was roiled by intense carnage during World War I, which had ended only five years earlier. Dick Diver says the following to Rosemary Hoyt, with whom he is falling in love:
"See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rags. No European will ever do that again in this generation."
--page 57
Fifteen years later the bloodiest and most horrible war in history began.
Dick goes on to explain why a European war is no longer possible. We sadly shake our heads in disbelief while reading this pathetically unprescient view of a clever, albeit fictional, contemporary of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was not being ironic; he wrote this at a time when the trauma of the First World War was quite fresh. How could civilized people be so stupid as to choose war again? A good question. Unfortunately, they were soon to behave in an abominably uncivilized fashion, as we now know only too well.
2. The Clever Contemporary: Homosexuality is Evil
Dick, a psychiatrist at a prestigious Swiss clinic, receives a visit from a wealthy merchant from South America who is greatly upset due to the "moral corruption" of his twenty-year old son:
"I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow; he was corrupt at King's College, Cambridge. He's incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work, but the result was nothing. Finally last week...I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip."
--page 244
Dick finds the boy to be "handsome and alert," that is, quite intelligent and perky. Dick asks him which came first, the drinking or the "abnormality." The boy responds as follows:
"I think the drinking is caused by the other." He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, "It's hopeless. At King's I was known as the Queen of Chilli (Chile). The trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated at the sight of a woman."
--page 244
Dick talks "pleasantly" with the intelligent young man for about an hour. "It was as close as Dick had ever come to understanding such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetuate his outrages..."
Dick advises the unhappy young man as follows: "It's a hole-and-corner business at best," Dick told him...If you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it."
--page 245
Times have changed, and, in this regard, definitely for the better. The greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality is, however, fairly recent. When I was in medical school, in the late 1960s, I remember a psychiatry lecture I attended. It took place in a conference room that accommodated about 20 students. The psychiatrist who gave the talk was, I thought then, ancient--but was probably no older then than I am now. He suffered from a progressive neurological disease, however, and reached his seat with great difficulty. He also had a rather marked tremor in both hands. He was quite stern as was his wife who accompanied him. (She knitted throughout the session with a grim expression on her face, without saying a word; she reminded me of Madame Defarge.) The doctor asserted that homosexuality was a grave mental and moral illness. He commented that W.H. Auden was indeed a great poet, but was quite mentally ill due to his alleged deviant orientation. What bullshit, I thought, but kept silent, as did everyone else--most of whom probably were in agreement with the decrepit expert, whom I nicknamed "The Not-So-Grand Inquisitor." His view of homosexuality, however, had wide currency at the time. But not for long: The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. Progress was slow at first, but steadier ever since. Who in my graduating class of 1972 could have imagined that gay marriage would be legal in the United States four decades later? I certainly didn't.
The encounter between Francisco and Dick is, I think, quite subtle. Dick is a "clever contemporary," but not exclusively so. He realizes that the young' man's sexual orientation would not be altered by therapy or by willpower, which was a progressive view at the time. Dick views homosexuality as a disorder much like drinking--it is not a "sin" but must be controlled--a view that is no longer appropriate today, although it is, sadly, still the official position of the Catholic Church. Dick, obviously, is promoting a double standard: if Francisco had been "sleeping around" with women while at college, he probably would have gotten a pat on the back. Activity that is viewed in one case as "sowing one's oats" is in the other case considered to be scandalous, even though the oats, albeit sowed in different fields, are exactly the same. The idea that Francisco might eventually fall in love and have a stable, loving relationship with a man was not a thought that ever crossed Dick's mind--oh, the folly of the times! Dick, a charmer himself, is, however, undeniably captivated by Francisco's winsome personality.
Fitzgerald portrays Dick, a character based on himself, as biased here, but much less biased than the homophobic zeitgeist of the times. Fitzgerald as the omniscient narrator presents, however, a much subtler picture. Francisco's father considers his son to be a horrible pervert. The narrator presents him as a intelligent vivacious individual of considerable charm. The implication is that the problem is with the father, and, to a less degree, with Dick. If Fitzgerald's position had been more in accord with the father, Francisco's personality would have most likely been colored with a much darker brush. The very understated implication is that Francisco is normal. Such a view was scandalous in the 20s. It is a tribute to Fitzgerald that he implied, albeit subtlety, that the scandal was homophobia, not homosexuality. He was able to laugh, albeit almost inaudibly, at one of the follies of his time.
3. The Clever Contemporary: Women are this and thats while Men are Thats and Thises
Although gender roles were changing rapidly at the time "Tender Is the Night" was written, the untamed lions of patriarchy were still roaring during the roaring twenties. Proud male lions were still very much in control of the pride, even though, in the wilds of Western civilization as in the wilds of Africa, lionesses did much of the work. Fitzgerald did not entirely escape this rebarbative jungle, as the following passage from the book demonstrates:
He (Dick) saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speer's plans--and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such "man-made" crimes as "cruelty." So long as their shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Seers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary's being damaged--or was she certain that she couldn't be?
--page 163
Before I discuss the gender issue, I would like to bring to the reader's attention two characteristics of Fitzgerald's writing, which are very much present here, as they are on just about every page of the book: remarkable psychological depth and a lyrical, figurative style of expression that is as beautiful as it is apt. "The pension on which her own emotions had retired" and "their shuffle of love and pain..within proper walls" are fine examples of the latter.
The above-quoted passage contains a fine example of the former as well. The fictive Mrs. Speers rivals the all-too-real mother of Judy Garland in her ambition for her daughter. She encourages her daughter, Rosemary Hoyt, now a young actress, to have an affair with Dick not with a goal of permanent relationship in mind, but in order to get more experience and become more sophisticated. Fitzgerald, always the good psychologist, convincingly portrays her as a ruthlessly ambitious women, who, thwarted in her own life, transfers her insatiable desires onto her daughter. Most of us have encountered persons like Mrs. Speers during the course of our lives; only about half of them, however, can flaunt a beard. Fitzgerald's error, a folly of his time now apparent to us all, is that he partially excuses Mrs. Speers's behavior because, well, that's the way women are.
I call this the Oedipal Fallacy, that is, attributing to nature what is attributable to nurture. Freud believed that the oedipal complex was an inevitable part of human nature. In his day, the women raised the children with love and acceptance; the distant fathers provided the discipline. In our day, many fathers are close to their kids; when fathers "mommy" the oedipal complex thrives as well as an oak tree thrives in the desert--that is, not at all. That women, thwarted in their ambitions, sometime behave like Mrs. Speers, is not due to the intrinsic nature of women, but due to extrinsic pressures of a society which demanded that female wings, as it were, must always be worn in a lady-like fashion, that is, clipped.
Fitzgerald, however, was not a male lion asleep in the jungle while his females prowled. We have seen that his views on homosexuality were hardly those of a fundamentalist; similarly, Fitzgerald's women are far more formidable than the cardboard cuties whom the zeitgeist of the times espoused. One shouldn't forget that Mrs. Speers's ambitions were centered on a daughter, who, despite the former's potentially damaging interventions, became a successful, self-assured woman, whose inner pockets were as full of empathy as her outer pockets--not in pants, but in a pocketbook--were full of cash.
Am I exaggerating when I consider Fitzgerald to be a proto-feminist? Perhaps, but just as in Lake Wobegone, all the women in the novel tend to be strong; the men, in contrast, tend to be weaker. For instance, Dick, who had everything handed to him, succumbs to his own narcissism. Nicole, who had everything taken away from her when her monstrous father sexually abused her, understandably descends into mental illness. Yet her inner strength eventually triumphs. By the end of the book, her assertiveness is the foil for her husband's passivity.
Weak men and strong women appear throughout the book. For instance, Abe North, who, as a musician, has apparently been permanently diverted from the Yellow-Brick Road of Early Promise to the Dun-Stone Path of Ongoing Lack of Success, becomes an alcoholic and suffers a shameful death in a speakeasy. Another instance: the fantastically wealthy Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is indeed a monster, but a very powerful one.
The fiction of male superiority is more apparent than real in Fitzgerald's transcendent fiction. Although not immune from follies of his time, the omniscient narrator of this novel, that is, Fitzgerald himself, possessed great insight into the human condition. Not only that, Fitzgerald has given us perhaps the greatest portrait of the Jazz Age in fiction; not only that, he accomplishes this with the creation of a story replete with human, perhaps all-too-human, vivid characters, that hasn't lost its ability to amaze and delight almost a century later, and, presumably, for centuries to come.
*
We invite you to become a cyberspace member of our club. In addition, we welcome any comments you may have. We also invite you to read Allende's "The Notebook of Maya" in preparation for the eighth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. In the meantime, we wish you quiet hours of contended reading.
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