The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922)

I suggested this book for my new book club. Actually, in all fairness, my new book club essentially chose this book for themselves, after I offered them a choice between something modern or something classic. I can’t quite remember what the alternatives were, but the point is, it’s their fault I chose this book.

And I was the only one masochistic enough to end up reading it.

It’s not that I don’t love haunting, moody, elegant writing with a touch of dry humour. I do, I swear I do and that’s why I loved The Great Gatsby.

Hell, we all loved The Great Gatsby — those of us with souls, anyway — but though this is unquestionably Fitzgerald’s excellent writing, with all the qualities listed above, there was something about Gatsby’s story that made it immortal, and that didn’t happen here.

I have the closing lines of The Great Gatsby written down in a notebook somewhere, and they still make me shiver a little inside, and I thought The Beautiful and the Damned was a sure bet.

I knew it wouldn’t be a barrel of laughs, but I thought like Gatsby it would have that lift, that loveliness that turns sadness into something beautiful.

It turns out sometimes the sad and sordid is just… well, sad and sordid and ugly. Unclean, as Gloria herself would say.

I’m half disappointed just because the book sounds so cool. I mean, The Beautiful and the Damned is sexy as all get-out as far as titles go, and it definitely fits. I have never met characters quite so beautiful or quite so damned.

But try as I might to read something more into it, it really does seem to eulogise, as the back cover so nicely puts it, “the vortex of that decade-long jazz party which ended in the cold dawn of the Depression,” that the Fitzgeralds were a part of.

I’m willing to be proven wrong, if there are any nerds out there who can muster up a meaning out of all the stuff about how Beauty is only allowed to remain in that society for 15 years.

And it’s fine for a book to be autobiographical, and it’s fine for it to have a nasty ending.

It’s just that it should have some redeeming awesomeness, and honestly, this book just made me feel like crap whenever I picked it up.

It wasn’t a boring or slow read. It was still a decent read. But I wouldn’t really recommend it… unless you’re a glutton for punishment, like me.