Stewart O'Nan's 2015 book West of Sunset is a historical novel, covering F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood, starting in 1937. It's a time very well chronicled, by Fitzgerald and others, a milieu where he met and interacted with dozens of other people who sometimes wrote about their own lives and much more often were the subject of biographies and tell-alls and memoirs and other histories.
I'm not a scholar of the period. But my assumption is that O'Nan could know pretty much what Fitzgerald was doing, at least vaguely, every single day during this period. And my sense is that this novel does rely on all that background material, that O'Nan is playing fair with all of the things historians and novelists know, that he's weaving his novel through the real days of the end of Fitzgerald's life to tell a specific story.
It's a quiet, elegiac novel, the story of a man who had great fame and acclaim and lost most of it, years before Sunset starts. His wife, Zelda, is living in an asylum back East, and never will have a "normal" life. His teenage daughter Scottie is at a boarding school, also on the opposite coast, and basically being raised by his agent. What he has left is debts, which he's paying down, and the impulse to work - both to write scripts for studios for pay (to eliminate those debts) and to write his own fictions, some new stories and, he hopes, the novel that doesn't get the title The Last Tycoon in this book.
O'Nan's eye is all-encompassing and understanding as always: no matter what he writes about, he has a bone-deep care for his characters, no matter who they are or what they have done. Sunset is written in a tight third person: Fitzgerald is central on every page, and we do know his thoughts, but he's not telling us the story. We're seeing him at a bit of a distance, as if he's already receding, either because this all was so long ago or because his peak was a decade before - take your pick.
There isn't an overarching plot; O'Nan makes it all hold together out of the material of an ordinary life. Fitzgerald works hard, on projects that often are doomed. He drinks and hangs out with other writers and with actors - drinks more than he should. (He probably works harder than he should, too; he's a heart patient, and heart troubles will eventually kill him.) He makes plans to visit Zelda, to bring Scottie to visit him, to get the three of them together as a family for a few days here and there. The plans don't always come together: there's more making of plans than completing plans.
And he has a major affair, with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who has her own secrets. Again, all of those secrets are real history; you can look up her Wikipedia page. O'Nan is working that very tricky thing of fitting his novel into a life that's already very well-known and well-chronicled, fitting all of the details into his narrative and telling us what it all means.
It helps that he's a lovely, deep writer. It helps that Fitzgerald is generally loved and respected. But the words and sentences and pages need to support that, every second, particularly since we know, as readers coming into Sunset, what the story is here. This is the end of Fitzgerald's life; it can only go one way and we know what will happen in the last pages.
It does happen. O'Nan tells it well, leads up to it brilliantly, makes it all make sense in the end. West of Sunset is a remarkably positive novel, with a lot of joy in it, for the story of a near-bankrupt has-been scrambling to write mostly lousy movies to keep himself and his family going.
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