Book Review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler |
| St. Martins’ Press, 2013 Hardback: $25.99 |
The Golden Couple of the Roaring ’20s was actually tarnished pyrite. This is revealed in Therese Anne Fowler’s recent novel, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Its overall message seems to be that reputations lie; it shatters any incomplete preconceptions of Zelda and Scott, leaving readers wondering what is fact and what is rumor. As Fowler writes from Zelda’s perspective,
“I was a Sayer, after all; a woman, yes, but still a Sayer; my life was intended to mean something beyond daughter-wife-mother. Wasn’t it?
“Oh, just let it go, a different voice urged me. What difference could your puny achievements possibly make?
“All the difference, the other voice answered.
“Which of my many possible lives did I want to define me? Which one could I have?
“And the question that troubled me most: Was it even really up to me?” (308)
Before readers delve into the story, they may skip to the last pages—not to learn how and when it ends in Zelda’s life, but how much of the novel is fact or fiction. Fowler’s repeated disclaimers that Z is a work of fiction based off an investigation of contracting facts, beliefs, and gossip is reassuring. The question, “Did this really happen?” may still exist in readers’ minds, but they can be assuaged by Fowler’s attempts to be as faithful to Zelda’s reality as possible.
The novel follows Zelda Sayer’s life after she meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, and finishes soon after Scott dies. Readers are easily swept up in the glitzy and glamorous era of New York and Paris in the 1920s, and the soothing beauty of the timeless Mediterranean. The couple flits between parties, hangovers, and writing sprees in a whirlwind of activity and promises. However, Fowler does not dwell on Scott and Zelda’s moments of destitution. Readers are never sure how Scott and Zelda are able to survive—where they get their money when he’s not writing, how much they have to borrow, or whose kindness they request; they just seem to get by. And according to Fowler, even Zelda was in the dark about financial circumstances.
Plot holes aside, the novel uses solid descriptions and voices. Readers could easily envision Zelda’s hometown, the glittering parties, and the sweeping landscapes of New York and southern France. And in the beginning, Zelda’s enthusiastic southern belle mentality radiates from her narration and dialogue. But as the story progresses, the structural twang in her narration slowly disappears. Perhaps as the story progresses, she is assimilating northern American and French cultures and leaving the South behind.
Largely, Zelda’s growth is due to Scott, and her transition from maiden into worldly woman is gradual and believable. Readers witness Zelda’s growth through her own eyes, as well as Scott’s dismaying spiral into paranoia and alcoholism. There is something voyeuristic about living a renowned writer’s life through his wife’s eyes. Through Zelda, Fowler reveals more of an unbiased representation of the writing life than if she had undertaken the task from Scott’s perspective. So many writers are neurotic, self-deprecating, and overly critical about their work, and it seems F. Scott Fitzgerald was no different. This novel is as much about him as it is Zelda, and writing about him from a woman’s perspective might have been easier for Fowler. The double layer of writers’ mentalities might have driven Fowler mad, but Zelda’s madness was a challenging and welcome plaything.
For most of the book, Zelda’s famed craziness is nonexistent. Her physical and medical problems coupled with marital strains make her behavior erratic, but insanity seems to be nothing but a vengeful rumor… until part four. Fowler’s Zelda is a misunderstood and captured woman struggling with her own independence during a riveting but stifling age when a woman’s role was wife, mother, and homemaker. Scott’s insecurities and unstable senses of responsibility drive her first to infidelity and—after his desperate attempts to make her adhere to a woman’s “proper” role—a physical and mental breaking point. In the story, the doctors call schizophrenia a “divided mind,” which is what Zelda is pushed toward: a divide between who she is and who Scott tries to make her be. (Doctors have since reevaluated her condition and diagnosed her as bi-polar.) Fowler writes,
“I was fighting for my right to exist independently in the world, to realize myself, to steer my own boat if I felt like it. He wanted to control everything, to have it all turn out the way he’d once envisioned it would, the way he’d seen it when he’d first gone off to New York City and was going to find good work and send for me. He wanted his adoring flapper, his Jazz Age muse. He wanted to recapture the past that had never existed in the first place. He’d spent his life building what he’d seen as an impressive tower of stone and brick, and woken up to find it was only a little house of cards, sent tumbling now by the wind.” (346)
But Fowler does more than explore the causes of Zelda’s insanity. She presents Zelda’s story and fragile state so realistically that readers will easily sympathize with her shifting emotions and rationality. This is one of Fowler’s main accomplishments: She made madness become rational. Another accomplishment: She reveals a person underneath the mask of legend.