"A poor boy from a rich neighborhood, a scholarship kid at boarding school, a Midwesterner in the East, an Easterner out West," F. Scott Fitzgerald "knew better than anyone how to live in an imaginary world." In West of Sunset, Stewart O'Nan (The Odds) fictionalizes Fitzgerald's final four years in the late '30s, spent in Hollywood scraping by, writing and editing screenplays while Zelda rides out her own ups and downs at Highland Hospital. Their years of wealth, fame and adventure are behind them, and though he lives modestly by Hollywood standards, Scott's finances are increasingly desperate, with Zelda's hospital bills to pay, their daughter Scottie's tuition and his own living expenses.
Between pills to sleep and pills to wake up, Scott struggles to hide his heavy drinking from his employers and eventually falls in love. He continues to visit Zelda as her mental illness persists and sees Scottie on holidays, while his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham, barely tolerates his drinking (not to mention his marriage). In these years, Fitzgerald begins but does not finish The Last Tycoon, his last manuscript.
O'Nan brilliantly, sensitively portrays Fitzgerald's internal drama with a tone of wry wit and doom. The nuances of Zelda's character are apt and appropriate, and appearances by Dorothy Parker, Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart add color and humor. O'Nan's characterization and dialogue are spot-on, and his choice of the less-glamorous years of his subject's life yields a beautiful, elegiac novel worthy of its model. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia