Enchanted Places: The Use Of Setting In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Thomas K. Meier

ENCHANTED PLACES: THE USE OF SETTING IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FICTION by Aiping Zhang. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. 193 pages. $49.95.

The second title to be published in the Greenwood Press Contributions to the Study of American Literature series, Enchanted Places divides F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction into five parts for the purpose of analyzing its settings: home, bars, schools, city, and Hollywood. The author, Aiping Zhang, defines setting as not just a mere locale, but rather as "a sophisticated device and an integral part of the story designed to convey a unique vision of life in a profound way." He leads with two major assertions: that Fitzgerald used setting "as a rich source of imagery to objectify the social trend and individual desire at a certain time and to turn a story into a parable ... to structure his work as a series of dramatic scenes that function as an exteriorization of the world within," and that "Fitzgerald experienced the time and observed the place intensely, and he presented them more honestly and vividly than most of the writers during his time." Zhang does a good job of demonstrating the former claim, but he abandons the latter by not attempting a comprehensive comparison between Fitzgerald and his contemporaries.

One can get a good idea of Zhang's book by reference to any of its five major sections. In his discussion of schools, for instance, he notes, fairly enough, that Fitzgerald used school and college as settings only in This Side of Paradise and the Basil stories. Zhang points out that This Side of Paradise is the first serious American novel to feature an American school and college, and he successfully ties the novel to the literary tradition of the Bildungs-roman. He analyzes Fitzgerald's idealization of college in Taps at Reveille and This Side of Paradise ("the glamorous miracle of Yale"), characterizing his method thus: he "completely covers Princeton with a traditional and romantic patina," emphasizing "the beauty of the campus ... `handsome, prosperous big-game crowds' ... [and its] cachet for social prominence." In fact, tellingly, Fitzgerald, "seldom, if ever, touches on the academic rectitude or intellectual learning on campus." Both in Fitzgerald's fiction and in his life, he showed disdain for what professors had to offer, reserving special scorn for the English department. Fitzgerald saw the academic side of college as boring, arid, and dull; the excitement, magic even, of collegiate life centered around athletics, student publications, and social organizations.

Zhang also has an interesting section on Fitzgerald's use of bars as a setting, a section that would have been improved by reference to John Crowley's important study of alcohol and alcoholism in fiction, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (1995).

Enchanted Places is a useful book for Fitzgerald scholars; one can look forward to the day when Aiping Zhang turns his attention to a comprehensive analysis of setting in the work of Fitzgerald's contemporaries as well.

THOMAS K. MEIER Elmira College