The Beautiful and Damned

Ever so occasionally, you read a book that seems to speak so much sense about your life as you are living it - a book that says what you will say, in forty years, when you look back at the life choices that you are making right now. This is how I felt when reading The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story of a young and frivolous couple who care little for responsibility and all for parties and beauty and wealth.

So far, so fabulous. But then Gloria and Antony, the beautiful and witty protagonists start running out of money, are cut out of the will and their marriage begins to disintegrate. Behind the facade of parties and alcohol, the tensions are apparent.

I love how absorbed the two main characters are, their witty conversation not unlike I might have with my friends over a meal - and yet this story is interspersed with Fitzgerald's social and life commentaries, so as to lead the reader. Sometimes the distinction between the fiction and this discussion is too obvious, and then it becomes apparent how much of a construction the characters are. It is strange, then, that these commentaries of Fitzgerald's were my favourite bits, my take home messages, a quote on a whiteboard hanging in my flat.

I found the pace to be slow in places - this may have been in part because all the parties do become same-y, which is an effect in itself, Gloria and Antony's whole lives revolving endlessly around the same nights.

In spite of it's dramatic ending and clear moral message against wantonness and irresponsibility that still defines the twenty-something lifestyle, however, I think this book does show a certain glamour and flashiness in freedom of this kind, something that I definitely enjoy!