Book Review: Tales of the Jazz Age includes a few of the best stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and several that achieve nothing more than being briefly entertaining ("Porcelain and Pink") and beautifully written. By this time magazines would publish anything he wrote, so Fitzgerald was scraping the barrel (he needed the money) digging up old sketches from college, absurdist ramblings, imaginary plays, six-page enigmas, anything else he could find, and they were all published. Some are more clever than brilliant ("Tarquin of Cheapside"), but the oddities are fun and demonstrate his range -- few would guess that all of these were written by our Chronicler of the Roaring Twenties a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was interested in experimenting, breaking the mold, and he could be absurdly silly as some sort of proto-Beckett. But amidst the others are high points of Fitzgerald's short story career. "May Day" is a serious (he calls it "unpleasant") and nuanced take on social and political issues of the day. In "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (my favorite) Fitzgerald demonstrates that the rich really are quite different than the rest of us, willing to calmly countenance slavery, fratricide, and serial killing to preserve their wealth. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a fanciful tour de force, is both more sentimental and more effective than I expected. (It's also a distantly related 2008 film with Brad Pitt.) These three works belong in any selection of his stories. Fitzgerald's secret weapon is his unique empathy, an ability to get inside the minds and emotions of any of his characters, and take us along with him. [3½★]
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