Finished: The Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald). Hmm, maybe my favorite of the Fitzgerald novels, or maybe tied with This Side of Paradise! I think the opening paragraph was one of my favorite opening paragraphs of most of the books I've read. I don't know why, but I just liked it. Here it is:

    In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"---yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. 
    This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch---not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward---a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

With this introduction we meet Anthony Patch. His grandfather, Adam Patch, is filthy rich. A civil war veteran, after the war he amassed a fortune of 75 million dollars. He and his wife had only one son, Anthony's father. Sadly, when Anthony was only five his mother died and then when he was eleven his father died. Instead of being brought into the fold and raised lovingly by his grandfather, Anthony was raised by private tutors abroad and not until he returned to the country to attend Harvard did he really begin to socialize with young men of his own age. For these reasons, and these only, I tolerated reading about the "poor, put upon" Anthony as he spent his entire twenties not working, living the social life, carousing with his best friends, Maury and Dick, and basically ignoring his grandfather...and mostly, waiting for his grandfather to die and leave him his huge fortune. Of course, this doesn't sit well with Adam Patch, who has become known for his pro-prohibition viewpoint. In fact, he's spent nearly half his fortune on it and other "reforms". Anthony is just flitting through life this way...not a bad or arrogant person, but just one who was not taught the value of working for your own dollar. He meets and falls in love with the beautiful, vivacious, free-spirited Gloria. In an aside I truly enjoyed, Fitzgerald writes of Beauty as a main character in this small two-page play who comes to life every 100 hundred years in human form. She will be the envy of all women and the desire of all men. Thus we are introduced to Gloria! When Anthony sees her:

Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea....

Love that writing! ::::sigh::::  So, Anthony and Gloria have a push and pull courtship until they both decide they are madly in love and can't live without each other. At this point, Anthony lives on the interest from $100,000 inherited from his mother. By the end of the book, after about eight years of marriage, they've blown through all that money. Anthony becomes a raging alcoholic, drinking heavily night and day. They still throw wild dancing and drinking parties in their home. Anthony tries a couple of jobs...one procured for him by his grandfather, but he quits within two weeks time. He's just not cut out for working. One night in the middle of one of their drunken parties, when Anthony is about 28 and Gloria about 26, the very old and frail Adam Patch shows up at their house with his manservant. Seeing the horror, he turns and leaves without a word. All efforts by Anthony to talk to his grandfather the next week are rebuffed. Anthony and Gloria fear greatly that Adam Patch will cut Anthony from his will. When his grandfather dies two weeks later, his manservant is left several million, and even some distant cousins, but the 30 million left in the estate is set up in a trust for the manservant to manage and dole out to charities as he sees fit! Anthony is left with nothing. Anthony hires a lawyer to have the will overturned and thus ensues a four year battle. During that four years, though, neither Anthony or Gloria ever buck up and settle down and try to earn a living on their own. They cash in more and more of the initial $100,000 from Anthony's mother until they are nearly destitute.

At the age of 32, Anthony has sunk lower than he could ever imagine. He must have a drink to start the day. He is belligerent to everyone, and picks fights even with his friends. In desperation, he reaches out to his old friend Maury who he had broken off with in bad terms a few years before. Maury ignores him and goes on his way. Gloria? She wants a new fur coat that she knows she can't afford. Mostly, she just wants her beauty to stay. Finally, after delay after delay and appeal after appeal, the day for the trial decision about the will has come. Gloria is going to ride to the trial with her cousin, and the other friend of Anthony's, Dick. Anthony will meet them there. Anthony, at his wits end, is visited right before he heads out the door by a young woman who he had an affair with while he spent a year in the army. She heard about the trial, and loves him, loves him, loves him, she exclaims. Anthony goes crazy berserk and throws a chair at her! She flees. Gloria and Dick come in from the trial searching for Anthony. He never showed up! They finally find him upstairs playing with his old stamp collection...his pride and joy and comfort when he was a boy after his parents died. They exclaim to him that the will was overturned!! Anthony is now worth 30 million dollars. Isn't it wonderful? Sadly, Anthony no longer cares. He's snippet of a shadow of his former self. What he thought would make him happy and looked forward to for all those years, simply doesn't matter to him now...or else his mind has finally rotted from all the alcohol.

    "Anthony!" cried Gloria tensely, "we've won! They reversed the decision!"
    "Don't come in," her murmured wanly, "you'll muss them. I'm sorting, and I know you'll step in them. Everything always gets mussed."
    "What are you doing?" demanded Dick in astonishment. "Going back to childhood? Don't you realize you've won the suit? They've reversed the decision of the lower courts. You're worth thirty millions!"
    Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.
    "Shut the door when you go out." He spoke like a pert child.
    With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him----
    "Anthony!" she cried, "what is it? What's the matter? Why didn't you come---why, what is it?"
    "See here," said Anthony softly, "you two get out---now, both of you. Or else I'll tell my grandfather."
    He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain----Italy....

 The book ends with Anthony and Gloria on a cruise abroad. Anthony is only 32 but a practical invalid in a wheelchair with a nurse to look after him. Oh, he's got his thoughts about him, but he's in a mode of reminiscing now about all his hardships. Gloria has her new fur coat.

OK, so it doesn't sound like a happy book at all, and it isn't. And...the characters, none of them, are people you would pull for. However, the writing in the book is so good and so descriptive and so heartfelt. It's just a shame that Fitzgerald only had four novels before he died at such a young age. And now I've read them all.   :-(  Five novels if you count his last one which was unfinished when he died. I don't know if I'll read that once since someone else had to finish it!