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Review of West of Sunset from Paste Magazine
West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan Review
By Steve Nathans-Kelly
Paste Magazine
Two familiar quotations from revered American author F. Scott Fitzgerald have come to define the writer’s final years, each in its way emblematic of Fitzgerald’s titanic talent and well documented decline:
There are no second acts in American lives.
I’ve left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.
The first quote, unearthed among Fitzgerald’s notes for his unfinished last novel,The Last Tycoon, typifies the problematic side of Fitzgerald’s virtuosic genius: insightful, eloquent, alchemically agile at transmuting the personal into the universal … and also a little bit sloppy. The generally accepted interpretation of this quote holds that Fitzgerald lamented something akin to a line sung by a relatively resurgent 60-year-old Bob Dylan: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”
The problem with Fitzgerald’s “second acts” quote? In the world of Hollywood screenwriting where the author struggled in the last years of his life to script a return to literary glory, Fitzgerald’s life already approached the end of a devastating second act. Fitzgerald’s life lacked a third act: regeneration, redemption, resolution.
On the other hand, the second quote, conveyed in private correspondence, evokes with naked candor the irreversible dissipation of the last part of Fitzgerald’s life. Stewart O’Nan captures this final half-decade vividly in his new novel West of Sunset. O’Nan might accurately have subtitled it “The Hollywood Years.”
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Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural
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A Fantastic Anthology Combining the Love of Science Fiction with Our National Pastime
Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses and superstitions than baseball, America’s national pastime.
Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural. Here you’ll encounter ghostly apparitions in the stands, a strangely charming vampire double-play combination, one fan who can call every shot and another who can see the past, a sad alternate-reality for the game’s most famous player, unlikely appearances on the field by famous personalities from Stephen Crane to Fidel Castro, a hilariously humble teenage phenom, and much more. In this wonderful anthology are stories from such award-winning writers as:
Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan (first U.S. print version of “A Face in the Crowd”)
Jack Kerouac
Karen Joy Fowler
Rod Serling
W. P. Kinsella
And many more!
Never has a book combined the incredible with great baseball fiction like Field of Fantasies. This wide-ranging collection reaches from some of the earliest classics from the pulp era and baseball’s golden age, all the way to material appearing here for the first time in a print edition. Whether you love the game or just great fiction, these stories will appeal to all, as the writers in this anthology bring great storytelling of the strange and supernatural to the plate, inning after inning.
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Advanced Reading Copy of West of Sunset
Get an advanced reading copy of West of Sunset via Penguin’s First to Read! First to Read provides members with the chance to be the first to read the best new books from Penguin, before they hit the shelves.
West of Sunset
A “rich, sometimes heartbreaking” (Dennis Lehane) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack.
Those 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 gorgeously and gracefully written 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 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. A sympathetic and deeply personal portrait of a flawed man who never gave up in the end, even as his every wish and hope seemed thwarted, West of Sunset confirms O’Nan as “possibly our best working novelist” (Salon).
Publication Date:
January 13, 2015
Praise for West of Sunset
“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
“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
“I’ll direct my enthusiasm for West of Sunset to writers who revere Fitzgerald’s short story ‘Babylon Revisited.’ 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
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 