The Beautiful and Damned

Took me about a month to read. A difficult book both to read and to rate, I ended up giving it three (out of five), but if I could've given it another half I would've. It seems to be a book that divides opinion. 

On the one hand you have Fitzgerald's gorgeously poetic lyrical language, the book is stuffed to the brim with easily quotable memorable passages:

There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure

I was intrigued by the parts that were written in dialogue, particularly the 'beauty' part.
 
Yet at the same time there are off-putting aspects. I know that we are not supposed to like Anthony and Gloria that much, but sometimes it can be quite hard to feel any sort of sympathy for two such unlikable characters to the extent that you stop caring about what happens to them. The plot meanders around their financial situation and the state of their marriage so much that it skips the parts where something actually happens (although I think again this may be a stylistic decision to fully convey the horror of meaningless lives, it nevertheless makes it quite difficult to read). 

I was surprised  by the ending. At first it's easy to assume that Anthony is about to be hauled off to the police station to be charged for the murder of Dot after lamping her with an oak chair, however, it is not certain that Dot has even entered the apartment, all we know is that there is a strong smell of cheap perfume and Anthony is surrounded by disarray, having apparently lost his mind. Then they abruptly inherit the money and the next we see is Anthony in a wheelchair on a ship.  

There is no real reaction from either character to the news that they have the money at last, and it invokes an odd confusion in the reader - because they are continually shown in such an unflattering, undeserving light there is definitely a sense that you don't want them to inherit the money, yet at the same time I think that this is the only way that Fitzgerald could end the novel; yes they have the undeserved reward, but it is clear that having learnt nothing from the experience of poverty and having ruined their lives to such an extent that they have lost everything aside from the money, there will be no happy ending for them. They are still and always will be damned. Anthony evidently doesn't realise this, and he is shown in the finally sentences of the chapter feeling exultant that he has come through what he looks on as a trial that he has faced completely alone:

Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life - and he had stuck it out stanchly [sic].

The only other way I could think of ending it would be Gloria leaving Anthony, but that would perhaps lead to some kind of redemption for her which would move away from the theme of the novel. No, instead they are able to carry on making each other as unhappy as possible, locked in perpetual money-spending misery.
 
Anyway, I'm glad to have read it and thought that it's a book with continued relevance, although I can't see it being a book that I would go back to. However, I would like to re-read The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night is one of the books on the bucket list two.