F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hollywood Reporter reports that The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes has signed on to direct The Beautiful and The Damned, which would tackle the shiny, bright, and often thorny relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. Though the glamorous duo were considered the jazzy embodiment of the Roaring Twenties, things did not end well (you know a relationship has gone south when one of you ends up in a sanitarium). Reportedly Mr. Cassavetes is sniffing around Keira Knighley to portray Zelda Saye, perhaps inspired by just how awesome the actress looked in Atonement. But who should play F. Scott Fitzgerald? After seeing Brideshead Revisited we know Matthew Goode could go period, but is he too dark-haired? Hey, what about Ken (Aaron Stanton) from Mad Men?

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95

The hazy golden specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over all first novels by young white male Ivy League graduates, but it looms especially large over this one, by Keith Gessen, a limpid-eyed, sensual-mouthed founding editor of the intellectual journal n+1.

It’s there in the title, of course, and in Mr. Gessen’s brittle romanticizing of New York City, though the chic neighborhoods have shifted since the Jazz Age (“Oh god—what would it take to live in such a place?” one character thinks, perambulating among the gleaming muscleds of Chelsea. “What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash?”) It’s there in the titular young men’s melancholy enthusiasm for booze (“I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly” confides one sozzled sophomore), and in their ambivalent pursuit of tempestuous, flighty women who “italicized things” and wear navel rings.  read more »