Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgeralds are one of the most well-known couples in history– renowned for their partying lifestyle and poetic turn of phrase. Most fans of the couple only know the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though, and have attributed his colorful wife to the background noise of an artist’s life. In fact, until I read this novel, the most I knew about Zelda Fitzgerald was what I had seen in the Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, where she is portrayed as an unstable flapper with a devoted and concerned husband. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald paints a different portrait of this couple; one that has been forgotten due to the harsh truth behind one of America’s most beloved writers.

Author Therese Anne Fowler has done her homework with this story and does not shy away from the unseemly details of Zelda’s life. Fowler starts us at the very beginning, in Montgomery, Alabama where we see a Zelda before her husband. The novel then goes through the years of life spent with an unpredictable husband who accumulates debt, mistresses, and a destructive bromance. In these pages, the secrets of the first American celebrity couple are revealed, telling the story of their lives outside the newspaper reports and flash of camera lights.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this novel made me hate F. Scott Fitzgerald a bit. Granted, when reading this it is important not only to remember the time period, but that Fowler’s sources come from the mind of Zelda and lack the input of her husband. Still, it was eye-opening to read a different version of their marriage, one that had been hidden from public knowledge for some time.

Fowler uses a very linear pattern of story-telling to write this tale. She starts readers at the end of Zelda’s life and writes as the narrator reflects. At the start, the author is very slow and meticulous which makes the beginning feel as though it is dragging. Fowler is intent, though, on inserting as much historic information about Zelda’s life before her husband, which helps the reader to see the contrast between before and after. Learning about the complicated relationship between the couple was a task and one that made me feel both exhausted and thrilled.

There is a clear love between the protagonist and her husband, but there are also insidious undertones that poison it. As the years continue, Scott’s alcoholism and writer’s block create an emotionally abusive atmosphere for Zelda. As a student, I was taught very little about the author behind The Great Gatsby, so this was interesting to learn. There are moments of passion between the two only to be offset by deep resentment. This complex relationship is hard to explain but easy to understand. There are probably many women who can relate to Zelda’s situation of being in love with someone who makes you unhappy. 

“Now, I saw how a woman might sometimes want to steer her own course rather than trail her husband like a favored dog.”

Most of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work was inspired by his life with Zelda, which gave the public a biased view of his wife. For example, in his novel Tender is the Night, Scott uses Zelda’s hospitalization as inspiration for his character Nicole Driver. Zelda wasn’t a fool, though, and saw this exploitation of her personal life coming. In order to give the public her side of the story first, she published Save Me the Waltz which she wrote while in a mental institution. It took Zelda two months to write this novel and, despite the bad reviews it received, its publication greatly frustrated her husband who had been unsuccessfully working on his novel for years.

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the early 1920’s

Published in 1932, Save Me the Waltz was not well-received by critics with the New York Times saying, “It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader.” Fowler’s novel depicts the emotional toll that these reviews took on Zelda, who had been publishing short stories and articles for years under her husband’s name. Without his name, though, it seemed to her that she had no literary standing. This realization most likely cause a huge rift between her and her husband and hindered her already precarious mental state.

“…my stomach lurched, as if it understood better than I did just how awfully stupid I’d been, and what it was going to cost me.”

Leading up to, and as a result of, Save Me the Waltz, Fowler shows us a woman whose artistic inclinations are shoved into a closet and whose husband’s insecurities force her into a mental institution with a false diagnosis of schizophrenia. Zelda’s mental breakdown is now suspected to be caused by manic depression– a mental illness far different from what she was treated for.

Fowler has worked hard to show us the misrepresentation history has made of this woman. In an interview with NPR the author says, “I went looking for some preliminary information, and very quickly was struck by the way the surface-level knowledge about Zelda doesn’t begin to describe the person that she really is…the more I learned, the more compelled I was to set the record straight — it became kind of a mission.” The Fitzgeralds have had many novels that seek to tell the truth behind their life, but none that looks at Zelda in such depth and with as great a compassion as this one.

From Midnight in Paris (2011)

Current Music: Good as Hell by Lizzo

If you liked this, try:
 Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Chris Greenhalgh



This post first appeared on Booksboys&booze | Stories From An English Major Wh, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

×

Subscribe to Booksboys&booze | Stories From An English Major Wh

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×