The Beautiful and Damned

I'm not sure I would have noticed an aspect of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald's second novel and the predecessor to Gatsby, or recognized it as clearly, had it not been pointed out in James West's introduction to the authorized text. It is this: The Beautiful and Damned is that rare novel in which a mature style is absent at the start but reveals itself by the final page. The novel's first hundred pages are earnest and overheated, almost mannered. But by the time Anthony and Gloria are married and reveling in their attitude of not giving a damn about anything, the author of Gatsby is clearly visible. In a subtler way, this evolution of style is also apparent in Streets of Night, the John Dos Passos novel of 1923 that precedes Manhattan Transfer.