SCOTT FITZGERALD: The Last Laocoon

by Robert F. Sklar ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 1967

The trouble with the increasing volume of Fitzgerald commentary is that, unlike such exegetical worthies as Proust or Eliot, the Jazz Age novelist seems to grow hazier, rather than sharper, when his life and art once again come under a prolonged scrutiny. Professor Sklar is a serious, high-minded, youngish critic, and his full-blown textual analysis is probably the most sustained and closely woven Fitzgerald has yet received. But one inescapably wonders whether all of Sklar's painstaking variations on the theme of ""the genteel romantic hero,"" or his equally weighty delineation of Fitzgerald's intellectual pursuits, really substantiates the programmatic picture of ""an Apollonian vision of moral order"" engendering a major contribution to and characterization of the modernist sensibility. However much we admire Gatsby or Tender, are these and other Fitzgerald works, anywhere near the daring and difficult creations with which the first half of the 20th century has been graced? Fitzgerald had an aching, old-fashioned beauty always on the point of disintegration, very seductive but unquestionably limited. Sklar's exceptional study should have kept that proviso better in view.

Pub Date: April 27, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION