Review of West of Sunset from Amazon (An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015)

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When an ambitious writer hops onto a high wire and strides across with grace, it’s a wonderful thing to behold. And I don’t mean this as hyperbole. Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset, his glimmering fictional biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s troubled years in Hollywood, is simply one of the best books I’ve read in many months. In some ways, this is a portrait of the artist as an aging man. We see Fitzgerald, “like an athlete,” awake each day at 5 to write, then toil through long hours at “the Iron Lung,” MGM’s catty screenwriters’ wing, then scratch out a few more words at night (which would turn into his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon). “When he was working, it worked,” O’Nan tells us. “It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it…” In truth, not a whole lot happens. Fitzgerald pops his pills, visits Zelda and Scottie back East, has a messy yet loving affair, and occasionally gets stupid drunk. We’re treated to sassy walk-ons by Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and Humphrey Bogart. But part of the quiet, somber and entrancing appeal is how fully we become absorbed by Fitzgerald’s fight for relevance, or at least a few bucks. Ultimately, it’s quite heartbreaking to see the legendary creator of Gatsby cling to his literary dignity, his reputation and sanity slipping from his grasp, an outsider to the end.

—Neal Thompson

Elizabeth Strout on West of Sunset

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From the Basler Zeitung – Elizabeth Strout on Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset

Stewart O’Nan is back – and his book, West of Sunset – is an amazement.  It covers the last years of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the years he was in Hollywood, and involves, necessarily, his relationship with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.    All this would be interesting enough on its own merits, but O’Nan has pulled off an astonishing feat.  He inhabits Fitzgerald in a way that is just remarkable.  I love Fitzgerald, I would have a natural inclination to keep him to myself, and yet the Fitzgerald O’Nan gives us feels like the Fitzgerald of my dreams; in this way the book rises up to enfold the reader, it enfolded this reader naturally and exquisitely.

We see Fitzgerald at the beginning taking Zelda for a drive, we see him on the train west, we see him at the Studio, and the Garden of Allah, but we really really see him — and we feel him.  Everyone is here, Ernest Hemingway, Bogart, Dottie Parker, Scottie Fitzgerald, and Zelda too. And yet it is not the cast of characters that makes this book so deeply compelling, it is as if the book itself has been imbued with the very spirit of Fitzgerald.  When he travels East again to see Zelda, the pace never falters, every word of this book scoops us along.

And when, at the end, he is standing by the mantel – the famous mantel that we know will be the last thing he touches – O’Nan takes us with him right until his last thought: But I’m not done.  I wanted to cry out, “No!”  And yet, I will say – he is not done, not now, not with this book.  It adds enormously to the Scott Fitzgerald I have always loved.

I can only thank Stewart O’Nan for bringing this version of this writer to me in such a way.  And only Stewart O’Nan, with his meticulous care and precision he brings to the page, could have done it.  Bravo!

Review of West of Sunset from Entertainment Weekly

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Reviewed by Melissa Maerz

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of those great American writers whose work is often eclipsed by his own legend. He’s so well-known as a wild-partying alcoholic who squandered his wealth while his wife, Zelda, lived out her days in a mental hospital that critics often quote (and misquote) his most famous line—”there are no second acts in American lives”—as if it described his own final days, when the glow of The Great Gatsby was dimming and he was starting work on The Last Tycoon. There’s a certain romance to the tortured-genius mythology, but Stewart O’Nan makes quick work of dispelling it in this beautifully written historical novel.

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