Stewart O’Nan: West of sunset, Penguin Books US, 9780143128243, $ 16,00

O’Nan’s brilliant, intimate portrait of Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood as a scriptwriter is   full of melancholy and bittersweet memories of lost fame and his marriage to Zelda.  I read the novel during a week where the skies only seemed to have shades of grey available and it was a very befitting mood background to this masterful story.  O’Nan’s fine writing transports you straight into 1937’s Hollywood, adorned with all the famous stars and movie bosses of the times.

When Fitzgerald heads for Hollywood in the Thirties to earn some much needed cash rewriting and writing scripts for the big movie houses, he leaves his daughter Scottie in a boarding school and Zelda permanently installed in a mental institution.  Medical bills are piling up, not to mention the debt they accumulated during their years of reckless living with Scott’s success as a writer fading into near oblivion. He has troubles getting advances for his books or selling short stories. 

It’s the golden years of Hollywood, Scott’s old friends Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway or Humphrey Bogart try to ease his settling in but only when he falls in love with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham does he feel he has a new life in Hollywood. Fitzgerald feels guilty about his new love and happiness, becoming more and more estranged from Zelda. His trips to a not only mentally but also physically very different Zelda and her family become a burden; he tries to fly Scottie in to visit him whenever his finances allow. With his world falling apart, remembering  their  famous  years in Europe of the Twenties, the roaring years on the East coast, trying to get over rejections and being fired from writing jobs repeatedly,  booze,  his old friend,  becomes a new problem.  Sheilah does not put up with his drinking and leaves him frequently, only to return to her older but still very charismatic, handsome lover, staying with him until the bitter end. Stewart O'Nan captured the mood of Fitzgeralds sad, tragic and self-destructive last years perfectly. 

It almost hurts that Fitzgerald died not knowing his body of work would become Modern Classics. 

The book will be published in German in March 2016 by Rowohlt in German, titled "Westlich des Sunset".