West of Sunset
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long behind him. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruin, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
The last three years of Fitzgerald's life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O'Nan's heartfelt new novel. With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald's past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and their daughter, Scottie.
Fitzgerald's orbit of literary fame and the Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel's romantic cast of characters, from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. Written with striking grace and subtlety, this wise and intimate portrait of a man trying his best to hold together a world that's falling apart, if not gone already, is a masterpiece.
'O'Nan is an incredibly versatile and charming writer. This novel, which imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's troubled time in Hollywood (with cameos by Dorothy Parker, Bogie, and Hemingway), takes up (like much of O'Nan's work) that essential conundrum of grace struggling with paucity. One brilliant American writer meditating on another - what's not to love?' -- George Saunders, author of Tenth of December
West of Sunset is a rich, sometimes heartbreaking journey through the disintegration of an American legend. O'Nan captures the fire and frailty of F. Scott Fitzgerald with an understated grace that would have made Fitzgerald himself stand up and applaud.' - Dennis Lehane
'An achingly nuanced love story and one of the best biographical novels to come along in years. O'Nan's great achievement here is in so convincingly inhabiting the character of Scott Fitzgerald and of the people surrounding him during his descent into the clarifying depths of 1930s Hollywood.' - T.C. Boyle
'Stewart O'Nan captures Fitzgerald's mood of spiritual reflection, without trying to imitate Fitzgerald's voice. This book is an inoculation against self-pity. It's not a mock Fitzgerald novel, but an original portrait of a writer struggling to keep his dignity while trying to make a living. It's one of the best books I've read in years and it deserves a cheering crowd.' - Michael Tolkin, author of The Player
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The last few years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life, when he lived in Hollywood (the title alludes to Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard), are the subject of this earnest but only fitfully interesting novel from O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster). The book inadvertently illustrates the truth of Fitzgerald's famous dictum: "There are no second acts in American lives." Conventional wisdom has it that Fitzgerald went back to Hollywood for money surely true with his wife, Zelda, a patient at an expensive mental hospital in North Carolina but this novel articulates a broader rationale: "He'd come west not just for the money but to redeem his previous failures here." There's something touching (if slightly surreal) about the author of The Great Gatsby hoping for redemption by writing film scripts, but O'Nan's Fitzgerald too often conjures the reader's pity, with his desperate need for money, fame, and love from readers and romantic interests and his alcoholism. The plot adds romantic intrigue to the mix in the form of Sheilah Graham, the L.A. gossip columnist (like Fitzgerald, a parvenu) who became Fitzgerald's lover. The book is thoroughly researched, featuring a huge supporting cast of famous players Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker, among others but it feels more like a television docudrama than a fully realized novel.
