Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“In America, you can invent your way to the top of any field.”

Their romance was the stuff of American legend: dashing young military officer sweeps Southern debutante off her feet in the midst of America’s first conflict since the Civil War.

Bold and beautiful, daring and dashing, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the Golden Couple of the Jazz age, defining the possibilities in being young, smart, and American in a changing world.

They were one of America’s first power couples; both talented and troubled they moved in elevated circles amid the intellectual and artistic elite of post World War I society, restlessly pursuing an ideal of adventure and excess that eventually broke both of them.

Therese Anne Fowler’s brilliant new book Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald attempts to give a clearer picture of the distaff side of a fascinating duo. Working from letters, writings, and verifiable stories of the Fitzgeralds, and supplementing this information with sharp discernment and vivid imagination, Ms. Fowler goes a step beyond biography and sets the reader inside the head of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

Beginning when Zelda was a bold young lady of 17, the novel covers the years 1918 until Scott’s death in 1940. As the story comes from Zelda’s point of view, it is to be expected that she would be the heroine of her own tale; however, Ms. Fowler allows her character the dubious kindness of self-discernment. Scott’s troubles with making and hanging on to money, his alcoholism, and rumored love affair with Ernest Hemingway—all are certainly depicted in all their ugliness, but Zelda does not spare herself. Her battles with mental illness, her lack of money and parenting skills, and her obsessive behavior are also on display in this incisive story.

Ms. Fowler does a marvelous job of conjuring up an age in American, and indeed world, history that was pivotal: America was flush with capital following the Great War, and for the first time many of her youth had spare time to create and enjoy the arts at leisure. Americans, in general, had suffered far less than Europeans from the war; young men who would once have been content to stay in one town for a lifetime were restless after having been abroad, and many returned to an Old World that was new to them, taking along wives and girlfriends.

Zelda and Scott traveled among these expatriates, many of whom became devoted to the arts. Ms. Fowler’s descriptions of the places her characters visit are vivid, her insights into these Children of Liberty lyrical: they“. . . [laughed] the way only people who haven’t ever suffered real loss or hardship can laugh.”

Zelda is as descriptive of her new love, finding Scott, “Worldly, but just as warm and eager as a golden retriever.” She looks into his eyes and reflects that, “They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.”

She follows him around the world time after time, riding a roller coaster of fame from its apex to its nadir several times over. Ms. Fowler presents the people and the scenery of the times in a combination of short, sharp descriptions and lush, flowing narrative.

Both work well in her distinctive voice, becoming a kind of cinema of the mind. Zelda’s love of her ancestral home in Alabama is written with a combination of desperate affection and near despair over its intolerance and intransigence to the changing times that evokes (and is quite worthy of) Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor.

When the Fitzgeralds make their move to New York City (and later the world), her style evolves to reflect F. Scott’s own novels. It’s quite a feat to attempt, but Ms. Fowler carries it off brilliantly.

While both Zelda and Scott are presented as flawed human beings, composed of equal parts brilliance and pain, Ernest Hemingway is thoroughly excoriated. The hatred between Zelda and Hemingway is legendary, and Ms. Fowler takes advantage of that to write scenes of great depth and insight, though Hemingway’s heirs might disagree. He is depicted as a thorough cad, a despicable social climber and closeted homosexual who hides behind a façade of ubermasculinity.

Ms. Fowler’s Zelda clearly sees “Hem” as a leech, his work only made barely tolerable by Scott’s revisions. Her writing is particularly strong in scenes of conflict between these characters.

Divided into five parts, the novel separates the lives of the Fitzgeralds into scenes, the tone of each varying as times change. There is one inexplicable intercessory scene, which seems spurious as it merely restates information from the previous paragraphs, and Zelda’s southern accent comes and goes in a troubling manner, but these are trifling tics in a marvelous novel.

When all was said and done, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were tied together for life from the first moment they saw one another. Near the end of their relationship, they lived in a state of constant siege, each sure that the other was responsible for all of the woes of their lives. Still, when after more strong declarations of hatred on both sides Scott reminisces about the good times and declares, “Damn it all, you are the love of my life,” we believe it.

And that’s all due to Ms. Fowler’s brilliance.