Three years before Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote a novel about a beautiful young couple who inherit no fortune, only the expectation of one, and slowly destroy themselves waiting for a rich grandfather to die. Anthony and Gloria Patch don’t have Gatsby’s tragic grandeur; they have something closer to the truth of what wealth-worship actually does to people who are simply idle, vain, and increasingly desperate.
It’s Fitzgerald’s angriest book, written in the full high of his own early success and already deeply suspicious of it — the marriage curdles in real time across the novel, alcohol and status anxiety doing what a bullet does to Gatsby more slowly and, in some ways, more cruelly.
Read next to Gatsby’s yearning or This Side of Paradise’s ambition, it reads like Fitzgerald rehearsing, one draft early, exactly what the Jazz Age would cost the people who believed in it hardest.
Read The Beautiful and Damned →
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