Review: Churchwell, Careless People (2014)

[truepenny]

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book that's a little bit difficult to describe. It's part biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, part history of the Jazz Age, part literary analysis of The Great Gatsby, and part examination of the unsolved Hall-Mills murder that was part of the inspiration for Gatsby. Churchwell does an amazing, effortless-seeming job of moving between her topics, always linking one back to the other three. She has combed exhaustively through primary sources, including Fitzgerald's scrapbook of newspaper clippings about himself, biographies and autobiographies of people the Fitzgeralds met in New York and Long Island in the early 1920s, and letters, his to her, hers to him, theirs to other people.

This is beautifully written and fascinating. She conjures up the Fitzgeralds' glittering world while at the same time making clear how savagely self-destructive it was. "Careless people" is of course a quote from Gatsby, but it also describes Scott and Zelda, and there was nothing they were more careless with than themselves.



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