Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

So, we can see that Fitzgerald, who, consciously or unconsciously,
employed the modern techniques, as described by Ford and put into
perfect practice by Conrad, in his Gatsby, including the flashback,
ran into a great deal of trouble when he set out to tell and show the
story of Diver. The problem with the first version is, as Wayne Booth
describes it in his brilliant study of the rehtoric of fiction, one of
over-distancing. But the revisions make a tragedy with no catharsis.
Still, the novel has beauty and brilliance.

Now, that we have so much, from Fitzgerld's advisors and critics, some
like th friends of Job, others like mathamaticians measuring the stars
that burst from his brain, calculating the collapse into a black hole
of mad debauchery, we needn't take sides. Wherein lies the beauty and
the brilliance? For this, after all, is where young Tom Pynchon sucked
honey. And it is was not only from the romantic phrases and the
lyrical Irish springs, nut in the structural, flaw as they were,
devices. And, I contend that P looked to Fitz as a model of more than
tenderness and what georgeous in Gatsby, more than the flotsam that
floated in his wake, more than the Myrtle mowed down by the Dynamo,
her vitality spilled on the highway...to the use of film as plots
within plots, of actors and actresses with one foot in the studio lot
and one foot in the street, the green lights down old est main
distorting the faces....