Book Review: The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline (2017)

Cover of The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline, 2017.

Author Cherie Dimaline, with several stacks of The Marrow Thieves.

It’s either the best possible time or the worst possible time to read a dystopian novel. Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves was the main selection for the city of Saint Paul’s 2020 Read Brave program. The theme of Read Brave this year was climate change—the other selection was Climate Justice, by Mary Robinson, which I reviewed here. 

The Marrow Thieves is set in Canada in a future that has been ravaged by climate change. For some reason, white people have stopped dreaming, while Native Americans still retain the ability to dream. As you can imagine, this had led to the Native Americans being hunted down and captured. The novel, written in the first person, follows 16-year-old Francis, nicknamed “Frenchie,” as he runs from the authorities and encounters a rag-tag collection of Natives who are traveling north, always on the run.

The Marrow Thieves is a quick, engaging read, and Dimaline does an excellent job of giving the uncertainty of the character’s lives a visceral impact. Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Metis Community, and The Marrow Thieves is her fifth book and first young adult novel. According to Dimaline’s website, she is working on the sequel to The Marrow Thieves.

Book Review: The Making of This Side of Paradise, by James L.W. West III (1983)

The Making of This Side of Paradise, by James L.W. West III, 1983.

The original dust jacket for This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published on March 26, 1920.

Professor James L.W. West III

When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published on March 26, 1920, it launched the literary career of one of the greatest American authors of the 20^th century. Fitzgerald’s fame and influence continue to grow, 100 years after his first novel appeared. The latest manifestation of Fitzgerald’s lasting fame is Nick Farriella’s parody “This Side of Paradise: A Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Quarantined in the South of France.” Published by McSweeney’s on March 13, 2020, Farriella’s parody has become a big hit, with many people thinking it was an actual letter from Fitzgerald. 

If you’re a Fitzgerald buff who wants to learn more about how This Side of Paradise was written, then the book for you is James L.W. West III’s The Making of This Side of Paradise, published in 1983. West has gone on to become the editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a scholarly series that was finally completed in 2019. 

West’s study of the manuscripts of This Side of Paradise, including an earlier version that Fitzgerald titled The Romantic Egotist, shed important light on Fitzgerald’s writing and editing techniques. Fitzgerald wrote his first draft of The Romantic Egotist quickly while he was in Army training camp from November 1917 to February 1918. Stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the commanding officer of Fitzgerald’s platoon was a young West Point graduate named Dwight Eisenhower. 

The Romantic Egotist was written in the first person, narrated by Stephen Palms. West writes, “Stephen’s narrative is so painfully open and naïve that it is difficult to read without a curious discomfort, at once effective and annoying.” (p.25) Stephen also addresses the reader directly, writing about the narrative that he is constructing; no doubt this was a sign of Fitzgerald’s haste to complete the manuscript. 

As rushed as Fitzgerald might have been, West notes that incidents in The Romantic Egotist manuscript will continue to reappear, in highly reworked form, in Fitzgerald’s later fiction. There’s even an account of Stephen’s train ride home from prep school to Minnesota that was the germ for a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby, in which Nick Carraway waxes rhapsodic about a similar train ride. Fitzgerald was ruthless in mining his own life for all the material he could. 

Fortunately, some passages cut from The Romantic Egotist didn’t find their way into Fitzgerald’s fiction. Namely, the passage in which Stephen and Eleanor Savage see her fur coat mysteriously move across the room. What made the fur coat move is never explained. As West writes, “This strange episode reinforces the connection in This Side of Paradise between sex and the supernatural.” (p.36) In the finished novel, the main character Amory Blaine sees the devil in a chorus girl’s apartment. Did I mention that Fitzgerald was raised Catholic? Fitzgerald actually revised the moving fur coat episode before ultimately deciding to delete it from This Side of Paradise. 

The Romantic Egotist was sent to the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons in May 1918. It was rejected, and the only editor at Scribner’s who liked the book was Maxwell Perkins. Perkins wrote Fitzgerald an encouraging rejection letter, and expressly told him to make revisions and resubmit the novel. Fitzgerald did, but the novel was rejected again in October 1918. Perkins went on to become Fitzgerald’s lifelong friend and editor, as well as the editor for two other famous writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s: Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. You know, no big deal. 

West’s study of the manuscript of This Side of Paradise helps us to understand the inconsistencies in Amory Blaine’s character a bit more. As West notes, the material that presents us with a more cynical Amory is mainly from Fitzgerald’s revision of the novel during July and August of 1919, and the material where Amory seems more innocent and naïve is left over from the manuscript of The Romantic Egotist. 

The chapter titled “Young Irony,” which occurs late in the second book of This Side of Paradise, in which Amory encounters the beautiful atheist Eleanor Savage in the Maryland countryside, was originally from The Romantic Egotist, and took place before Stephen Palms’ senior year at Princeton. As West writes of the chapter: “Amory’s immature, adolescent posturings in the novel therefore seem odd. He is supposedly a twenty-three-year-old graduate of a sophisticated eastern university and a combat veteran of World War I, but he moons over Eleanor, spouts clichés and bad epigrams, and composes mediocre poetry at the dinner table.” (p.70) 

Fitzgerald sent Perkins the manuscript of This Side of Paradise on September 4, 1919. Perkins fought hard for Scribner’s to accept the book in an editorial meeting, saying: “My feeling is that a publisher’s first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing.” If Scribner’s was not interested in young authors, “Then we might as well go out of business. If we’re going to turn down the likes of Fitzgerald, I will lose all interest in publishing books.” The vote was a tie, with old Charles Scribner II himself eventually coming down on the side of publishing. (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg, p.15-6) 

Perkins sent Fitzgerald an acceptance letter dated September 16, 1919, just a week before Fitzgerald’s 23^rd birthday. Unfortunately, in the ensuing six months before the novel was published, it’s clear that a professional proofreader didn’t go near the manuscript. This Side of Paradise was riddled with misspellings, and mistakes like Amory’s hair changing from blond to auburn within a page went unnoticed. In a letter from July 8, 1920, Perkins tells Fitzgerald that the editorial department has been forced to do the proofreading. Perkins writes, “It is purely the mechanical and therefore irksome.” (p.106) So that might explain why a careful proofreading job simply wasn’t done. But still, wasn’t there some freelance proofreader out there who could have helped Maxwell Perkins? 

West counted the number of lists that were made of the errors in This Side of Paradise, and he comes up with 11 different lists covering some 40 or 50 different mistakes! Some of these mistakes were corrected in the 4^th and 7^th printings of This Side of Paradise, but many were not. The unfortunate upshot was that Fitzgerald acquired a reputation as a dim-witted fool who didn’t know how to spell the name of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson—misspelled as “Christie” in the first edition. Fitzgerald was a poor speller, and proper names gave him lots of trouble—Hemingway for example, he often spelled “Hemminway.” But Fitzgerald obviously assumed Scribner’s would make those corrections, as indeed they should have. 

After all this talk of errors, there’s a doozy on page 118 that escaped the proofreaders of West’s manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania Press: “If one really wants Fitzgerald’s errrors, then one needs a facsimile edition of the manuscript.” Yes, “errrors” with four r’s. Quite humorous, all things considered. 

In his conclusion, West makes a passionate plea for a fully corrected version of This Side of Paradise, as he notes that the 1960 edition of the novel that was still in print in 1983 had many errors. West himself would be the editor for the version of This Side of Paradise that finally corrected all the errors of past editions: the 1996 edition, produced for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This version is the basis for the 2003 Scribner trade paperback, which is the version of This Side of Paradise I recommend. 

This Side of Paradise sold about 50,000 copies during its first year and a half in print. It wasn’t one of the top ten best-selling novels of 1920, but it was a book that made a considerable impact. Nearly all the reviews of the novel make it clear that, almost overnight, Fitzgerald had become one of the leading literary voices of a new generation. 

One of the finest tributes to This Side of Paradise was written by John O’Hara, a novelist whose subject matter was similar to Fitzgerald’s own: “A little matter of twenty-five years ago I, along with half a million other men and women between 15 and 30 fell in love with a book. It was the real thing, that love…after the appearance of that book I was excitedly interested in almost anything that was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald; his novels, short stories, and his nonfiction articles…the novel was This Side of Paradise. All he was was our best novelist, one of our best novella-ists, and one of our finest writers of short stories.” (From the Introduction to The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945)

Fitzgerald would be amazed to know that 100 years later, his first novel is still being read and enjoyed, now in an edition that comes closer to what he was trying to convey all those years ago when he wrote about Amory Blaine’s voyage of self-discovery.