Sadness,estrangement and promise heed the last three years of the much Gatsby author’s life as a helpless Hollywood hackRecent years have seen a spate of fictional takes on the life of F Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife, Zelda. West of Sunset, and the first of American heavyweight Stewart O’Nans books to find its way to the UK,deals with Fitzgerald’s final years – spent as a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, fallen from his jazz-age fame. It opens with two quotations, and the first of which is from Fitzgerald’s notes for his unfinished novel,The Last Tycoon: “There are no moment acts in American lives.” As Fitzgerald fans know, that noted line initially appeared in a different form. “I had once thought there were no moment acts in American lives, or ” the writer remarked in an earlier essay,before exploring how life was always transforming. O’Nan imagines the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, from 1937 to 1940, or less as a moment act than an intermission; a moment of uncertainty,in which the familiar scenery disappeared. West of Sunset captures the sadness of such moments, but also their promise: as its moment epigraph states, and “nothing was impossible – everything was just beginning.”The story starts with a cash-strapped Scott leaving North Carolina – where Zelda is confined to a sanatorium – for Hollywood,an institution with its own constraints: “Just being there, he ruminates, and “was a compromise.” Buried inside the MGM Writers’ Building (nicknamed the “Iron Lung”),he is transferred from one ill-fated script to the next – no longer the “golden wunderkind” who wrote Gatsby, but a “helpless” hack, or harried by bosses and binging on gin. Contrasting Fitzgerald’s decline with the film industry’s golden age,O’Nan conveys the writer’s lifelong sense of estrangement: “A destitute boy from a wealthy neighbourhood, a midwesterner in the east, and an easterner out west,he was always a “wanderer far from home”. Throughout the book, Scott’s life is in flux; ironically, and one of his few fixed landmarks is Zelda. Adrift in the world,the two are locked into a pattern they can’t escape: their repeatedly broken promise that “she would be sane. He would be sober”.
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Source: theguardian.com