Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese May Fowler

It’s taken me a while to get this blog up and running for a number of reasons:

a) Exams.

b) The slightest glimpse of sunlight makes everyone extremely unproductive (it’s scientifically proven).

c) I’m a bit of a technophobe and regularly argue with my computer screen when things

are not blindingly obvious.

I got there in the end though, and here is my first post!

With all the hype around Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby at the moment, I thought it would be the perfect time to read Therese Anne Fowler’s portrayal of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of celebrated writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott died aged 40 of a heart attack, following years of alcohol abuse; Zelda perished a few years later in a fire during one of several stays in a sanatorium. Since the deaths of the glamorous couple, writers have been intrigued and divided by the life of the celebrated writer and his wife, the First Lady of the jazz age.

Some accounts indicate that Zelda was the destructive force that drove F. Scott Fitzgerald to failed works, alcoholism and emotional breakdown. Fowler, adopting the voice of Zelda, espouses the opposite- that it was Scott’s obsession with fame and control that turned a self-assured and hopeful eighteen-year old from Montgomery, Alabama into a bored, depressed and erratic chess piece on her famous husband’s board of power, manipulation and violence. Several critics have slated Fowler’s account as inaccurate and biased, claiming that her dates are sometimes wrong and, more importantly, that her depiction of Zelda as the innocent victim is misleading and in places downright false. All valid criticism- but as the cover tells us, Fowler is writing first and foremost as a novelist and not as a biographer. And, in consideration of the novel solely as a work of fiction (inspired by history), I found Z absorbing, dazzling and often surprising.

We follow Fowler’s Zelda from her early adulthood in the Deep South, to which she makes many later references when the couple travel to New York, London, Paris and the French Riviera. It was these notorious adventures in the early ‘20s that helped inspire The Great Gatsby itself. Zelda’s escapades with Scott also introduced them to the glamorous yet destructive circles including Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel and, most notably, Ernest Hemingway. I’d encourage you to read Z if only for the scandalous tales of Hemingway explored by Fowler, a 1920s version of Heat magazine- type guilty pleasure. Whether they are all true is up for debate, of course, but I found the anecdotes fascinating nonetheless. It is these first two-thirds of the book that engrossed me the most; after this, there are no real surprises- it is inevitable that Zelda and Scott are driving each other to devastation and it’s far too late to turn back by this point, with a child and (more importantly, if this account is to be believed) a reputation to consider. So, the last sixty or seventy pages are less gripping than I’d found the first few hundred to be.

However, I cannot express just how much I love the vivid characterisation, the rich dialogue and the twists in the main body of the novel. Fowler’s style is, on the whole, compelling and mesmerising. The narrative carefully entwines themes of love, fame, betrayal and despair against the alluring backdrop of the Roaring Twenties to create a new, elegant and captivating story of Zelda Fitzgerald, the ‘First Flapper’ who struggled to find herself in the shadow of her legendary husband.