the aesthetics of ennui

Fitzgerald's 'The Beautiful and Damned' is for all of us twentysomethings.

There is – as there always is – a trend clogging the internet as its oldest natives battle their 20s: recommendations for books or films about feeling lost and confused and hollow and wrong as we navigate adulthood. The lists are well-intentioned, if predictable, and point you towards novels like The Idiot and Everything I Know About Love. One July last year at an old bookstore in Nice, I couldn’t find any of these booktok options. Really, it was for the best. Wanting to preserve the romantic intrigue of reading an invitingly-titled book in public, I walked out with Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned. At the time, I knew it only as Ms Serena Van der Woodsen’s favourite book, which was reason enough to try it.

I see now, that it is a timeless aesthetic account of waste, ennui, and early adulthood. Why do we continue to read Fitzgerald? Why is he – irrevocably whitemale – a part of canon? Because of sparkling, painstaking prose from a man who knows he’s smart and won’t let you forget it.

Messier and more indulgent than Gatsby, this novel meandered through ideas with luxury and yawning humour. There is champagne without socialism, decay sets in slowly, and sheen turns to rust unnoticeably. Its discussion of the lost generation rings true, and will perhaps never not ring true as each age is christened by its own set of freakish technologies and social effluvia. This is a book for the ADHD procrastinators, the TikTok philosophers, and the self-proclaimed writers who will die before putting ink on a page. It is for us, the stylized generation, whose conflation of beauty and truth has become a social fact, a principle structuring all interactions in ever-cruder and hackneyed terms.

I was laughing almost immediately, underlining almost maniacally. Early on:

“Well what he means by brains in a woman in is—”

“I know,” interrupted Anthony eagerly, “he means a smattering of literary misinformation.”

“That’s it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the country is a very good thing or the kind of who believes it’s a very ominous thing.”

Documenting the post-collegiate life, everything golden turns to disappointment as the titular maladjusted hedonists (Anthony and Gloria) make mythically poor decisions. Holy shit, is this play about us? Like Anthony, I see myself as: “a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism.” Like Gloria, I feel girls are no longer beautiful in a shining, endless sense, instead, we are “as pretty as she would ever be again.” One of my friends picked up my copy of the book and read some of my annotations and, asked, deservedly, if I’d considered being less insufferable.

But in earnest, as essays are no longer curricular requirements, ideas and anti-capitalism develop patinas from disuse. It was all fun and existentially-destabilising to get a job in the first place, but now, old friends are scattered across continents and lives unlived are closing doors with silent slams. Now is the time when we actually stop calling as frequently, settle into routine, miss and yearn and long but remain unable to do anything about it. When we come home from work we find ourselves physically unable to open a book, much less write one, because staring at moving light is all that can be achieved. I wrote in my journal in the comedown of summer, “it is August in my twenty second year and I am covered in dust.” There is a subtlety to these deaths in which artists never become, and in which gregarious banter dims into polite conversation by the coffee machine Monday morning.

 Towards the close of the book, Fitzgerald writes:

“What becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?”

“You drift apart,” suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.

“They change,” said Gloria. “All the qualities that they don’t use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up.”

“The last thing he said to me,” recollected Anthony, “was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for.”

So, this novel is also a warning. For the would-bes and the should’ve-beens. I left a note on a page: check back at 40? In the first half of the book, Fitzgerald details the day-to-day wherein dreaming starts to feel like too much work, and mundane inertia settles into the corners of bright eyes. In the beginning, as with early adulthood, his characters have undefined hope and shapeless ambition, but they remain shackled by stupidity and circumstance. And then, towards the end, hope itself is polluted, it becomes “more sordid than despair” for it is ‘too late now.’

The point, I think, is twofold. The novel is an excoriation of how idealism wanes, and it is also a plea to resist the numbing. Fitzgerald holds my hand in moments of lethargy and immobility and finds the aesthetic glint of rotting away in a bedroom. And he also takes my hand slides it against the dust that will form over my lips and eyes and furniture if I keep sacralizing suspension instead of activity, energy, creativity - life. Perhaps there is something fated about aging, that the beautiful are to be damned. But in its description of this fatedness, this determinism, I left wanting to rail against irrelevance, to ascend the trappings of style, and really, with the confusion and wrongness and mess of it all, to do something.