A review by emmareadstoomuch
The Last Tycoon by Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald

5.0

“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”

There are very few writers whose careers you can trace through their work like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The kind of charming immaturity of This Side of Paradise; the polished, profound (if a little thematically evident), career-defining The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night, a decade’s attempt to live up to Gatsby; and, finally, The Last Tycoon, the book that finally would’ve done so.

AND FITZGERALD JUST HAD TO GO AND DIE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.

I do not know how to review this book. I am completely, truly, one hundred percent sure this would have been Fitzgerald’s greatest. Maybe not his most well-read (Gatsby is perfect for high school underclassmen reading lists - theme-filled AND obvious) but definitely his best.

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

This book, even in its incompleteness, is so subtle and evocative and nuanced. The characters are what Gatsby’s could have been if they were more people than images. Fitzgerald treats his women better, even his minorities better.

1930s Hollywood is as glamorous and seedy and fascinating as one of Gatsby’s parties - and as Fitzgerald himself pointed out, a much needed escape from the war burgeoning as he wrote.

“People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.”

Reading this is an experience. It’s kind of like if you were assigned a translated book for school, and you read two thirds of the wrong translation before giving it up and Sparknoting the rest. Thorough Sparknoting, but Sparknoting all the same.

It’s interesting, and it provides a unique look, but god the whole time I was just wishing that Fitzgerald lived to finish this work.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he would have gotten too wrapped up in it - made it too much like Gatsby, rewritten the themes as too obvious, changed the ending or added more motifs. Maybe Kathleen would have gotten the treatment Daisy Buchanan did. Maybe it would have always been way too overshadowed by Gatsby to get any attention.

But we’ll never know. And it feels like the worst thing ever that we’ll never get the chance.

Bottom line: I loved this so, so, so much. Fitzgerald, man. If only you had another year.

“How different it all was from what you'd planned.”