Nearly ninety years after its first publication, _The Beautiful and Damned_ is still a shockingly relevant account of the entitlement class, the children of the rich or privileged who don't know how to navigate through life without big money. And, it's a New York City novel--written as only a mid-westerner can. It seems to me that because New Yorkers are too much in the middle of it to see themselves clearly, an intelligent "outsider" like F. Scott Fitzgerald must come along. To write as well as he did, Fitzgerald let the city inhabit him. New York got into his blood, and he recorded it in narrative right down to the dirt under the carpet. Fitzgerald's details lead the reader into the depths of the beautiful and doomed couple, the Gloria-Anthony entanglement, as they are part and parcel of the extremes of poverty and wealth (in the World War I era or the roaring 20s).

I don't know how Fitzgerald knew what he knew about the human psyche, or specifically about how a young man might react when he is good-looking and swimming in money and New York, but Fitz's life at Princeton University among this set of people gave him the environment in which to observe; Fitzgerald supplied the story around which the narrative coheres. Of course, there are autobiographical elements to this novel--a lot of himself and Zelda--but what the literary art requires is critical distance. To put his main characters through some shameful scenes, Fitzgerald had to know what tough love is in the New York City context. He had to put his couple to the test, people who from birth had relied on the "religion" of charm and money. And the author had more than just critical distance: F. Scott had them down right! Every expression, every word. Gloria: "This is life! Who cares for the morrow." And you can see Anthony deciding to have one more drink, his speech becoming slurred, his manners maudlin. While Anthony and Gloria wait for his inheritance, we find out what they're made of.

Most pleasurable about Fitzgerald's craft is his carefully-controlled technique of letting Anthony and Gloria visit hell (the "damned" in the title) while softening the harsh surgery-like light with well-timed, well-handled, lyrical sentences. In a single beautiful line, the passage of the winter sun describes both Fitzgerald's craft and his beautiful couple's descent: Gloria "lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room" (p.173). Fitzgerald knew how to show the attenuated and refined way downhill.

One more thing about the craft of writing: Only the omniscient narrator technique--which Fitzgerald employs--can show characters in shameful acts and show what they're thinking, and the circumstances in which they got there, and how they "need" money in order to "survive." I wonder if now, in nearly 2010, this novel is not more important than in 1922. More than ever, _The Beautiful and Damned_ is a national portrait. (I can see how "spending" money could be the "sex" in the novel.)

Advice: Read this novel while in New York, if possible. The first time I read _The Beautiful and Damned_, I was living near 123rd (me, a Westerner!). I looked up every address in the novel (except for the gray house near Cos Cob, Conn.) and got to know New York through this novel. In fact, I could almost pick out their final apartment in Harlem near 127th.

I really liked The Great Gatsby. Reading this in high school was like reading Shakespeare in high school. I got through it, but didn't care for it or understand why it was so great. As it was when I read Shakespeare recently, I fell in love with this book. I think the characters were so rich and well-developed and the language was so beautiful. Further, Fitzgerald's dissection of the failure of the American Dream is incredible.

The reason I reduced it to four stars is, in essence, Nick. Nick's thoughts are too much. I enjoyed the other characters, but couldn't get past his odor. He just explained his thoughts too much. I felt that these thoughts were Fitzgerald's failure: he was using these thoughts to tell (as opposed to show) his story. The end of the book was especially dulled by telling. It seems to me that this engaging mystery tread onward after the end of the story.

Regardless, this book was amazing. Fitzgerald created a rich world with full-bodied characters. He vividly describes the yearning we all feel and shattered it to pieces. Great read. Would recommend.

"It is seven thirty on an August evening. The windows in the living room of the gray house are wide open patiently exchanging the tainted inner atmosphere of liquor and smoke for the fresh drowsiness of the late hot dusk. There are dying flower scents upon the air, so thin, so fragile, as to hint already of a summer laid away in time."

This is the story of a young couple Anthony and Gloria Patch living out their days to the hilt in New York City as they await the death of Anthony's grandfather, Adam Patch from whom they expect to inherit his massive fortune.

Gloria is a spoilt child from Kansas City turned into a sophisticated and most beautiful woman. Gloria does not intend to lift a finger to do any domestic work in the home, no matter how slight; while Anthony who considers himself an aesthete, finds it quite hard to get his act together and instead of buckling down to some work, prefers instead to hang with his wife and their friends on nightly binges. They drink and eat in the classiest restaurants and hotels, rent the most expensive apartments, travel out to the West in the spring time driving plush cars, wearing top-of-the-line clothing and just generally living it up high on the hog, as they wait.

Meet Maury Noble who is Anthony best friend who spends his time between New York and Philadelphia; Richard Caramel who has just completed writing a book and looking for new ideas for a second one. Joseph Bloeckman from Munich who started out small in America and is now a big shot in Show Biz. Also the quiet Jewess Rachael Barnes and Muriel Kane who is young, flirtatious and sometimes a bit too talkative and Tana the Japanese housekeeper of the Patches.

We are shown the Patches at their very best as the novel starts, with the world at their feet and loaded with cash with which they make very expensive choices. But, as we get further in, we see things begin to change gradually and we realize that those very choices will be their very downfall. It was quite a good read but it could be very heartbreaking at times as we put ourselves into the shoes of the main characters. All lovers of F. Scott Fitzgerald should read this book if you haven't done so already, and those of you who like reading about the ultra rich in the Roaring Twenties this one is for you. It is the kind of book that you feel you will want to read again. It is that good and I shall miss it.

Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 10/04/04)

This novel turned out to be much better than its first 75 pages would suggest. On the other hand, it's no "Great Gatsby." At its best, it is a complex portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Fitzgerald is interested in the changes love undergoes within a marital relationship, and he approaches his subject from unexpected angles; his main characters, shallow in themselves, acquire surprising depth as partners in a failing romantic enterprise. At its worst, the novel is juvenile, immature in its subject matter and its style: Fitzgerald satirizes easy targets (e.g., fat women; social climbers trying to pass themselves off as members of a higher stratum; a Japanese servant with a limited grasp of the English language, etc.), and the plot eventually devolves into lurid melodrama. The ending is almost farcical. One gets the sense that Fitzgerald grew weary of the novel at a certain point and just decided to wrap it up quickly, ripping off "Sister Carrie" and "L'Assommoir" for a sensationalistic ending.

The novel is divided into three sections. In Book I, we are introduced to the protagonist, Anthony Patch. He is a good-looking Harvard graduate, presumed heir to his grandfather's fortune, who resides in languorous splendor in a Fifty-second Street New York apartment. We also meet Gloria Gilbert, a beautiful and self-possessed young woman with whom Anthony falls in love. The back-cover of my Scribner paperback version describes the novel as "a devastating portrait of the nouveaux riches, New York night life, reckless ambition, and squandered talent." This is a bit disingenuous. The novel talks a little about New York nightlife, but there's nothing about "reckless ambition." In fact, the principal characters are utterly without ambition beyond a vague desire to be wealthy and fabulous. This is part of their problem. Anthony and Gloria have no specific goals, no hobbies, no passionate interest in anything except themselves and alcohol. "Squandered talent" is also a stretch. Anthony is presented as a flawed individual from the onset, but in Book I Fitzgerald is trying to convince us that his main character is nonetheless brilliant, a man of unlimited potential. Unfortunately, this is difficult to swallow. Anthony's supposed brilliance is on display when he engages in intellectual arguments and clever badinage with his Harvard buddies, but the dialogue is stilted and artificial. Fitzgerald fails to convince us that Anthony embodies youthful promise. Instead, Anthony comes across as a fop whose sense of entitlement is unjustified. This is a great weakness of the novel because in order for Anthony to fulfill his role as Talent Squandered in Book III, his potential for greatness should have been established in Books I or II.

Book II, in which the marriage of Anthony and Gloria is dissected, is very well done. Although they initially were drawn to each other for reasons that do not bode well for a marriage - Gloria admires Anthony for being defiantly useless, "a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world," while Anthony is entranced by Gloria's beauty, self-absorption, and indifference to him - for a while true love blossoms. It is an intense love, destined to burn brightly yet briefly. As the fervor cools, Fitzgerald traces the relationship's decline in meticulous, chronological detail, lingering over each stage of waning love and burgeoning contempt. Both characters are well delineated; they come to life in the reader's mind and seem ever more real as they grow further apart. Among other things, their marriage is affected by the simple fact that Gloria and Anthony are growing older and more mature. As far as Fitzgerald is concerned, maturation is not a good thing. Fitzgerald's fascination with youth is famous. His belief that life is effectively over after, say, the age of 23 is in evidence here, and anyone who believes that our nation's current obsession with youth is unique to this country or to our era should revisit Fitzgerald (or Boccaccio, for that matter) to be reminded that by the age of 29, a man has "ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and (has) become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed...We substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic."

In Book III, Fitzgerald reexamines the philosophy upon which Anthony has structured his entire existence, the belief that "nothing much is worth doing." Fitzgerald's characters are now approaching early middle age, and the author seems to be mourning the loss of their youthful arrogance. There's nothing wrong with being lazy and useless, Fitzgerald argues, as long as one is lazy and useless with panache. Only the young can pull this off successfully; middle-aged people, lacking bravado, merely become ineffectual. Likewise, only the young can be spectacularly callous like Gloria in Book I. Self-doubt and a sense of conscience creep in at a certain age. Anthony and Gloria are no more flawed than they were at the beginning of the novel, Fitzgerald seems to be saying, but now their flaws are less attractive.

All in all, not bad. I give it 3.62 stars.

For whatever reason it took me a little bit to get into this book.. I was just picking it up and times when my focus wasn't 100% there. However once I finally dedicated myself to reading a good chunk, I easily fell for the characters and story line. Besides Fitzgerald just has this way of writing that tugs you in mutliple directions of feeling hope, anguish, happiness, and disgust.. I felt myself hating Gloria and being really attracted to Anthony's character most of the time, but at times I felt really sorry for Gloria and was annoyed with Anthony. Fitzgerald did an incredible job of depicting both sides of the story all while allowing you to come up with your own judgments about what kind of people you think Anthony and Gloria are. This is definitely a book I will want to reread later on down the road and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for an escape in the world of literature.

As others have said here, this is no Gatsby. Nor should it have to try to be--if Gatsbys were a dime a dozen, the literary sphere would be a much different place. This novel does indeed suffer from occasional prosiness, an attitude that is perhaps too bleak, and a cast of characters you probably wouldn't want to speak to even if you were paid for your time. But it also contains moments of brilliant lyricism almost on par with some of the writing in Gatsby, and although you wouldn't necessarily want to befriend its cast of characters, their struggles and situations are universal to all of us.

This is a novel about rich white people in the years around WW1 suffering from ennui, and if you can't handle that sort of thing as a matter of principle, you should probably look for a different book. The characters are not likeable in any conventional or meaningful sense: they make terrible decisions, say terrible things, and spend much of the novel destroying themselves and one another. That's why it's important that, before you read this, you dispense with the idea that characters need to be likeable to be empathetic. Although we may not relate to the extraordinary amounts of privilege these people possess, we can relate to their habits and attitudes--all of us have gone into slumps, deferred on our responsibilities, spat at the world, and done things that we regret. These are the things that constitute the lives of the characters of this novel. If we find these things to be unlikeable in our characters, maybe that's just because we don't like them in ourselves.

Maybe it’s just me, but to me personally “The Beautiful and the Damned” drew a lot of parallels with Fitzgerald’s personal life and relationship with his wife, Zelda. Certain aspects of it come across as eerily autobiographical, but maybe that’s what makes the novel so positively fascinating.

Set in the age of jazz and prohibition, Anthony and Gloria represent a perfect picture of the entire high-society generation of that time. The transition between old money and the nouveau-riche of New York society is wonderfully presented, and both of our characters find themselves caught in the swirl of that new age, with nothing to offer it. They’re young and clueless and entirely devoted to the idea that lavish lifestyle is something that they’re both entitled to without having to actually do something to support that lifestyle. After putting all of their hopes into Anthony’s inheritance which he should have gotten from his exceedingly rich grandfather, they learn that the elderly gentleman wrote off all of his money to his aid and multiple charities instead. But even that doesn’t stop them from selling more bonds and throwing more parties all the while hoping to win the money back through the interminable court appeals.

From that point on, the couple’s story became a train wreck from which one can’t tear their eyes off. With the same apathetic attitude, Anthony develops a drinking problem all the while thinking himself being somehow cheated out of his rightful position in society. Driven to near poverty in a shabby apartment, both Gloria and Anthony live hand to mouth most of the time, yet both still positively refuse to do anything about it. The ending was… interesting. On one hand, I was glad everything turned out as it did for the couple; on the other, I was a bit disappointed as a lesson was clearly not learned by either.

The setting and the prose is fabulous as always, and Fitzgerald doesn’t disappoint with his imaginative metaphors and set of characters, some of whom you’ll love and some - detest. Fitzgerald was indeed the voice of his generation and the novel is worth reading just for that reason. It’s not as brilliant as “Gatsby,” but it’s brilliant nevertheless, in its own, somewhat shallow and destructive, way. Highly recommended.

It is a great read and you can really connect to the characters like your in the story

Anthony Patch was a shallow, small-minded, egoistical man.  He was having a damned hard time keeping a goddess wife, Gloria.  He was her slave.  I was amazed, disgusted at Gloria's heartless vanity; why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it.

Both of them accustomed themselves to the enjoyment of riches. They considered fortune as necessary everywhere.  As soon as he lost his fortune and funds, he was disgraced, he lost his character, and lost all the few friends he had.

It's very easy to resist temptation, if one wishes.

Absolutely gorgeous pocket book!

How to describe the entirety of this novel?

Often I will put one or two lines on Goodreads after finishing a book. For The Beautiful and Damned, the lines were as follows:

“What a beautiful and strangely desolate novel. My goodness.”

And The Beautiful and Damned is exactly that. It soars from theatrical beauty and then plummets to cold desolation, to unfolding of horrific emotion. The characters are at once vivid and on the verge of crumbling. The prose, as ever, is delicious, decadent and evocative.

The theatricality comes mainly in the form of Gloria, a shining beacon for the indulgence of the Jazz Age, who delights in the social freedom and seemingly exquisite nature of her life, and who enthrals Anthony Patch, a writer and the narrator of this tale of excess. Within the first few pages of their encounters, it occurred to me that both characters seemed to represent both Scott and Zelda. Once this idea had taken hold, I found it impossible to shake off, and by the time I closed the book on the final page, I was convinced that this was what The Beautiful and Damned was: Scott’s wishful thinking for their life and his bitterness and adoration for his wife poured into a single novel.

Which is heartbreaking, but it makes for a compelling and achingly wistful tale. Admittedly, it took me a good few pages to get into the story – I was waiting for Gloria to appear and ignite the fireworks – but when the lady arrived, I was gripped. I followed every encounter with wide eyes, and I admit that I had no idea how the novel would end, if it would be happy or not. When the end did indeed come, I found the climax very startling, very sudden. Some might argue that it was too sudden, that the novel feels cut off or rushed because of it, but I disagree. It left me shocked, but realising later on that it had been building up to it, with both characters hurtling towards trouble and not knowing how to stop. It was gripping, wonderful, and agonising all at once.

Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I adore Fitzgerald’s style, and The Beautiful and Damned only reinforced this love for his writing. It is a complex exploration of human character, and the heights it goes to are dizzying, as are the sudden falls.

I highly, highly recommend this. I cannot recommend it enough. The Great Gatsby might be considered his masterpiece, but I much prefer the characters in The Beautiful and Damned. They’ve stuck in my head much longer than Gatsby or Daisy Buchanan have.

And that really is saying something.

Aún no la he terminado, pero puede que no llegue a terminarla. Si la terminó, cambiaría.la reseña. Lo que puedo decir, de momento, es que no es una lectura para cualquier persona. Yo tenía muchas expectativas puestas en ella, pero de momento se me está haciendo insufrible. Quizá todavía no haya llegado a "la parte interesante, pero la vida de estos pijos de la época, me aburre hasta más no poder. A ello hay que sumarle la edición que es peor que mala, con una letra no apta para cegatos, que hace que se pierdas y tengas que estar usando el dedito a modo de cursor para seguir línea a línea la historia. En fin, de momento no me está enamorando, pero puede que eso cambie. Y, por favor, señores, ¡a ver si es posible que la próxima edición la pongan a una letra que no sea de 6,5 puntos,!

Una storia che ci arriva ancora attuale pur essendo il ritratto di un'epoca lontana, quella dei ruggenti anni Dieci:

siamo nell’America del proibizionismo, quell’America dove tutto sembra possibile e ogni sogno realizzabile.

In poche parole l’America di Fitzgerald.

I protagonisti sono la bellissima Gloria ed Anthony Patch, una coppia giovane e inquieta che ruota tra feste, balli ed eccessi di alcol fino alla noia totale.

Anthony, rampollo di una ricca famiglia, si sente già stanco della vita. Come scrive magistralmente Fitzgerald,

"stanco di nulla, stanco di tutto, del peso del mondo che non aveva mai scelto di sostenere..."