West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan review – a fine fictional F Scott Fitzgerald

Sadness, estrangement and promise mark the last three years of the Great Gatsby author’s life as a helpless Hollywood hack

Recent years have seen a spate of fictional takes on the life of F Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife, Zelda. West of Sunset, the first of American heavyweight Stewart O’Nan’s books to find its way to the UK, deals with Fitzgerald’s final years – spent as a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, fallen from his jazz-age fame. It opens with two quotations, the first of which is from Fitzgerald’s notes for his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon: “There are no second acts in American lives.” As Fitzgerald fans know, that famous line initially appeared in a different form. “I had once thought there were no second acts in American lives,” the writer remarked in an earlier essay, before exploring how life was always transforming. O’Nan imagines the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, from 1937 to 1940, less as a second act than an intermission; a moment of uncertainty, in which the familiar scenery disappeared. West of Sunset captures the sadness of such moments, but also their promise: as its second epigraph states, “nothing was impossible – everything was just beginning.”

The story starts with a cash-strapped Scott leaving North Carolina – where Zelda is confined to a sanatorium – for Hollywood, an institution with its own constraints: “Just being there,” he ruminates, “was a compromise.” Buried inside the MGM Writers’ Building (nicknamed the “Iron Lung”), he is transferred from one ill-fated script to the next – no longer the “golden wunderkind” who wrote Gatsby, but a “helpless” hack, harried by bosses and binging on gin. Contrasting Fitzgerald’s decline with the film industry’s golden age, O’Nan conveys the writer’s lifelong sense of estrangement: “A poor boy from a rich neighbourhood, a midwesterner in the east, an easterner out west”, he was always a “wanderer far from home”. Throughout the book, Scott’s life is in flux; ironically, one of his few fixed landmarks is Zelda. Adrift in the world, the two are locked into a pattern they can’t escape: their repeatedly broken promise that “she would be sane. He would be sober”.

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