F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic last act

Is anything more poignant than genius in decline? It's hard to imagine after reading West of Sunset, Stewart O'Nan's almost unbearably bittersweet portrait of the once-great novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's sad yet darkly glittering final years in Hollywood.

By 1937, when this fine historical novel begins, the 40-year-old Fitzgerald's heyday is long past. Most of his triumphs — This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby — are out of print and largely forgotten. His soul mate, Zelda, spends her days drifting in and out of sanity in a mental hospital in Asheville, N.C. Their teenage daughter, Scottie, is off at boarding school, seen only on rare, awkward visits.

Saddled with debt, Fitzgerald takes a train to Los Angeles, working as a script doctor at MGM and other studios. There, laboring thanklessly on one dubious screenplay after another, he falls in love with Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist with a secret past; drinks and smokes heavily, further damaging his increasingly fragile health; and, between assignments, begins work on what will be his final, ultimately unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

It's a literary catastrophe, this squandering of the gifts of the man who might have been— and perhaps was anyway, despite his slender output — America's greatest novelist. Turning the pages of O'Nan's novel, you shake your head at the spiritual violence visited on Fitzgerald by the meat-grinder of Depression-era Hollywood in the form of the executives, producers and directors who drain his gift for wordsmithing, then capriciously replace him with other writers who undo most of his work.

He does have the occasional satisfaction, producing scenes and dialogue that manage to stay in movies like Three Comrades, which made a star of Margaret Sullavan, and Gone With the Wind, on which he must contend with a whirlwind of notes from a manic David O. Selznick. More often, O'Nan paints the cynicism and frustration of the studio system as a sustained assault on Fitzgerald, whose sensitive constitution was never strong in the best of conditions.

The darkness of this grim scenario is alleviated by O'Nan's consummate skill at the snap-and-crackle of period dialogue. It was a time when a firmament of great writers in their own arenas, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ogden Nash and Aldous Huxley, were drawn to Los Angeles, contentedly turning in hackwork in exchange for ample paychecks.

Over lunch at the MGM canteen or candlelight dinner poolside at the Garden of Allah — where the silent-screen siren Alla Nazimova makes a brief, ghostly appearance, a vision of a past as gorgeous and as lost as Fitzgerald's own — the repartee gleams with malicious wit.

Much of that wit is aimed at the stars who dot the sky of West of Sunset like diamonds: Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, the director Joseph Mankiewicz. But they aren't all bad. Bogie is a mensch, Crawford is loyal, Dietrich is a fine nursemaid for a wounded Ernest Hemingway (who makes a cameo appearance).

There's a drifting quality to the story, and a lack of suspense, that's typical of novels bound to facts. We know how things are going to end. And yet it's a testament to O'Nan, and perhaps to our affection for the memory of our beautiful, beloved, doomed Scott Fitzgerald, that we dread it anyway.

He tried. He failed. And for that we love him more than ever.

West of Sunset

By Stewart O'Nan

Viking, 289 pp.

3.5 stars out of four