Once again, I feel like a slacker. I can assure you that I’ve been reading steadily all spring and summer, but not many of my selections seem to apply to this poor forsaken blog. Oh, and I have a teething baby. You can blame a teething baby for just about anything: sleep deprivation, foul moods, scatterbrained behavior. So thank you, Baby Fitz, for providing the perfect alibi for where I’ve been for the last few months. The whole five folks who ever read this blog will appreciate it, I’m sure. Anyway, I’ve decided that being a new mommy is sort of like being in love for the first time. It’s all-consuming and it’s all you can think or talk about. Soon you find yourself gushing to your friends about how your kid ate sweet potatoes for the first time or stood up by himself for the first time. And then you see your childless friends’ eyes glaze over. Silence. Crickets. And then you remember that anyone who’s not a parent does not give a crap about any of these things. Just like my high school friends got bored to tears hearing about my first love (What was his name again? Oh yeah, it was that Nick guy!), my friends are so over hearing about baby stuff. And I’m sure my readers aren’t interested in baby milestones, either.
On that note, I will get back to using my brian and talking about books for a few precious minutes. By now it’s probably obvious that I gravitate towards anything to do with the 1920’s. Since the Gatsby movie came out, a bunch of historical fiction about Scott and Zelda has followed. The only one I’ve read so far is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. So much has been written about the Fitzgeralds, and I’ve read a great deal of it, that it’s almost hard to imagine an author having a new perspective. But this novel held my attention from start to finish. It’s been long enough since I’ve read biographies that I’m not sure how close to the truth it stays. In her acknowledgements, Fowler says she “often felt I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott” as she read through their biographies. The Team Zelda people believe Scott ruined Zelda’s life and use her as an example of how women suffered before feminism. It’s true that she never got to pursue writing, ballet or painting in earnest because Scott didn’t really want her to, but she also had mental issues. Scott’s drinking messed up their lives considerably. It’s hard to tell what Zelda would have been able to do if she’d been more stable and able to get a divorce and establish her own career. There’s no doubt that Scott “borrowed” from her letters and journals in her own writing. Some stories published under his name were written by Zelda. But would we ever have heard of Zelda if she hadn’t been married to Scott? I don’t think she was exceptional enough as a writer or a dancer that she would’ve been famous if not attached to her husband. She would have married a rich guy in Montgomery, Alabama, and would’ve been an eccentric Southern socialite if she had not married Scott.
Z is very sympathetic to Zelda and portrays her as an ever-suffering wife of an alcoholic who spends money extravagantly. Scott cheats on her and tells her not to write novels because he doesn’t want her stuff to compete with his similar material. His friendship with Hemingway causes all sorts of problems in their marriage. I don’t have a difficult time believing Hem was a d-bag who has his own agenda to topple Scott off the top of the literary ladder in the late 20’s. The author thinks he outright made up stories about the Fitzgeralds in A Moveable Feast that persist today as facts about Scott and Zelda. I’ve never thought about that, but she’s probably right. So many famous stories about them are accepted as myths, but no one really knows if they ever danced in the fountain in front of the Plaza. These things make fun stories, but the day-to-day marriage of these two people was a hot mess. And reading their tale always starts off as fun and games, when Scott was making an astonishing amount of money from short stories and they made friends with every famous writer of the day in New York and Paris. But then it all descends into alcoholism and madness and it’s so sad. When I finished this novel I felt angry on Zelda’s behalf. Scott was broke and bitter and very ill at the end of his life and his wife died in a fire in a crappy mental hospital. Where were all of her fancy friends when she really needed them? No one cared about Scott and Zelda at the end of their lives, and it took a couple decades before Scott’s writing gained some respect as his novels were reprinted.
I find it hard to accept the author’s portrayal of Zelda as the suffering wife, though. I know it’s too simple to dismiss her as crazy the way some people did, but she was far from innocent. It takes two to tango, as they say, and she and Scott always knew how to push each other’s buttons. They both cheated on each other. They both spent too much money. They both drank too much. They could have accomplished so much more if they could have gotten themselves together. It’s a shame. But overall Z is a fun piece of historical fiction. Maybe just skip the last few chapters of depressing material?
No less depressing is the life of my beloved Dorothy Parker, but any fan of hers knows that she could always find the humor in her dilemmas. Ellen Meister decided to write a work of fiction with DP as a character. In her acknowledgements of Farewell, Dorothy Parker, she said she realized that a ton of fiction has been written about Jane Austen and other famous authors, but not one novel existed about DP. So she wrote one. Good for her. I share her taste in authors, and by her liberal references to DP’s poems, stories, and reviews, you can tell she knows her stuff. The premise of the novel is a little cheesy, and DP herself might even write a snarky review about it. A movie critic with serious social anxiety finds the ghost of DP in the guest book of the Algonquin Hotel. DP’s ghost helps the protagonist find the courage to fix all the problems in her life. She finally stands up for herself with the ghost of DP standing by drinking gin and offering witty remarks. It’s a heartwarming story in the end, and a quick read.
Light, quick reads seem to be all I can manage these days. Every attempt I make to read a Serious Classic lately has been a total fail. I started listening to the audiobook of War & Peace and got completely frustrated with the endless chapters of play-by-play on the battlefield. The chapters where characters actually have some emotional drama in their lives kept my attention for the first section. Yes, it’s just one of those books on my bucket list, but that one might actually kill me. I’ll make another attempt when I have more brain power. Ditto for the poems of Rilke, which are fascinating and bizarre. I kept reading the same page over and over and barely comprehending a word. But they are pretty. I will keep looking for a classic that my mommy brain can understand right now.
A Modern Librarian Reads the Classics 