Reviews of West of Sunset from Tweed’s, HuffPo, and Chicago Tribune

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Considering the abundance of material by and about Fitzgerald, it might be reasonable to ask what a novelization of his life might offer. The answer, like Fitzgerald’s best writing, is simple and beautiful—it’s an amazing story. Focusing on the final years of his life, Stewart O’Nan’s remarkable new novel, West of Sunset, shows Fitzgerald in Hollywood hoping to engender that elusive “second act.”

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In his new novel West of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan imagines Fitzgerald’s last years with passionate intensity (and I do not use the phrase with W.B. Yeats’s negative edge). Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald have long been subjected to fictionalized autobiography, in poor Zelda’s case less historical fiction than what I call, with dismay, hysterical fiction. Such novels often claim to be thoroughly researched – a paradoxical claim for fiction. Some are well-written and engaging, and some are awful, simply capitalizing on the golden Fitzgerald name. West of Sunset does not invoke that name. Its cover does not feature famous faces, but evokes Hollywood of the Golden Years, foregrounded by an old typewriter (Fitzgerald hand-wrote, but, in Hollywood, appreciated the plentifully-availably typists). Within, O’Nan has made not only a good novel, but a sensitive, sad tribute to a writer he clearly loves.

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O’Nan, author of more than a dozen works of fiction, skillfully pulls us into Fitzgerald’s gilded and yet familiar world. He brings the Hollywood legends to life. By the end, they feel like friends, one of O’Nan’s aims.

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Casting F. Scott Fitzgerald in Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset

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Arguably the greatest American writer of the twentieth century – perhaps in history – F. Scott Fitzgerald was as complex, compelling, and ultimately tragic as any character in his legendary body of work. Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, West of Sunset, is a nuanced, witty, and moving chronicle of the troubled author’s final years living amid the decadence of Hollywood during the golden age of cinema.

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was well beyond his years of greatest success. In financial and emotional freefall, the alcoholic Fitzgerald made his way to Hollywood to fulfill a screenwriting contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Despite his sometimes crippling doubts about the state of his creative abilities and the ongoing turmoil in his relationship with his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald remained of captivating charm even if it was little more than a facade. Given the timeless nature of Fitzgerald’s body of work, the stranger-than-fiction nature of his final years, and his literary stature, West of Sunset is a semi-fictionalized biography ripe for adaptation. Let’s take a look at some possible casting choices, shall we?

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Review of West of Sunset from The Washington Post

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By Maureen Corrigan

… That grim yet undeniably fascinating last act of Fitzgerald’s life is the subject of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeous new novel, “West of Sunset.” As he has demonstrated in “Last Night at the Lobster” and “Emily, Alone,” O’Nan is a writer alert to the courage and beauty inherent in the stories of people who simply have to keep on keeping on. What interests him about Fitzgerald’s exile in Hollywood is not so much the glitter (although Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and other stars make appearances), nor his love affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham (whose blond good looks evoked the young Zelda), but rather Fitzgerald’s anxious commitment to his work as a screenwriter. Most of the movies Fitzgerald was assigned to were dreck (although there was a short stint on “Gone with the Wind”). Nevertheless, sitting down every day in his office or the various furnished cottages and apartments he rented in and around Hollywood, Fitzgerald fueled himself with cigarettes and Cokes (or, frequently, something more potent) as he labored to make flimsy scripts better. Fitzgerald was always a worrier, relentlessly tinkering with “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night,” even after the publication of those novels. It’s that F. Scott Fitzgerald — the worn-out yet relentless craftsman — whom O’Nan compassionately evokes in “West of Sunset.”

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TribLive and The Week

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Two links of interest in TribLive and The Week:

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Fitzgerald fascination: Stewart O’Nan book, new biographies, film projects focus on F. Scott

O’Nan says “every journalist wanted to take me to a Red Lobster” when that novel was published in 2007, so his wife suggested he seek out more glamorous material.

“What do I know from glamour? I’m from Pittsburgh,” he says. “But American glamour is Fitzgerald on the Riviera. American glamour is Greta Garbo. So what if I look at one of the most romantic places in American history (Hollywood in the late 1930s) through the eyes of our greatest romantic. If I can’t make that glamorous, I’m not trying.”

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