"Nothing was impossible – everything was just beginning." This epigraph to West of Sunset, Stewart O'Nan's 15th novel, comes from the star of the show, F Scott Fitzgerald.
The book deals with his final years as a screenwriter in Hollywood following the lukewarm success of Tender is the Night. Everything was indeed just beginning for him, or at least beginning again, with scripts replacing novels and new flame Sheilah Graham supplanting old flapper Zelda. However, unbeknownst to Fitzgerald, and expertly chronicled by O'Nan, all that was really beginning was the end.
O'Nan instantly alerts us to Fitzgerald's altered status by opening with the muted celebration of his 17th wedding anniversary with Zelda at her sanatorium, and then showing him turn up in LA with no one there to greet him. Twenty years earlier he was in love and on the cusp of literary fame. Now, in 1937, he is a lonely, bankrupt, washed-up alcoholic, "the king of things going wrong".
No sooner has Fitzgerald arrived at MGM than he is set to work writing and revising scripts. It is thankless graft: films are suspended or shelved and he becomes one faceless hack among many, crudely shunted from project to project. His sanity is saved by English gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. The pair enjoy a first date at a mob-owned club, after which a love affair blossoms, one strong enough to turn Fitzgerald's routine visits to Zelda into a chore.
At work and at play, Fitzgerald mingles with the likes of old rival Ernest Hemingway who bores anyone in his vicinity with tales from the Spanish Civil War; Humphrey ("Bogie") Bogart who bears no grudge for the split lip Fitzgerald once gave him and who tells him that The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece; and Dorothy ("Dottie") Parker, who is now "almost matronly, not the dark pixie he'd known those incoherent years in New York".
O'Nan sprinkles enough stardust but also brings in less celebrated people who have a place in Fitzgerald's heart, such as daughter Scottie and glamorous blast from the past Ginevra King. As Fitzgerald's relationship with Sheilah intensifies, so too does pressure to deliver first-rate scripts. He works around the clock, relying on his insomnia and countless colas to keep him going, particularly when on his last chance rewriting Gone with the Wind. In moments of weakness he reaches for the gin and invariably wakes up on the floor, having either passed out or been knocked out. When Sheilah is not his lover she is his nurse who must dodge his black rages, steer him back to sobriety and then help him pick up the pieces.
O'Nan handles Fitzgerald's personal demons and professional difficulties with aplomb. In his hands, a boozed up Fitzgerald is a sobering sight. We are reminded of sunnier times during the glittering Jazz Age when Fitzgerald was a "dreamy egotist" – and then see him again on another binge or a deskbound all-nighter, desperate to prove himself.
Although a tragic figure, the Fitzgerald that emerges is one that soldiers on despite his misfortune. On one page he is dealt a double-blow: magazines that used to publish his stories now reject them, and his agent sends him a royalty cheque for a meagre $1.43 for recent sales of his books. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, Fitzgerald gets up early to work on what would be his final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.
Along with Fitzgerald's resilience, O'Nan highlights his decency. Realising he loves only "some long-lost version" of beautiful and damned Zelda, he nonetheless comes to accept that "he would always be responsible for her".
Curiously, O'Nan makes no mention of Fitzgerald's incisive Pat Hobby stories about a scenario hack trying to make ends meet with one "polish job" after another. Otherwise, he incorporates all the key aspects of Fitzgerald's twilight years, including his premature death, and presents them in prose that at times achieves the beauty and pathos of his subject's.
West of Sunset offers both a poignant and unsparing portrait of a forgotten writer struggling to reinvent himself and a broken man finding love again. Whether a Fitzgerald fan or not, prepare to be mesmerised.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance essayist and reviewer.
