the beautiful & damned: toxic lovers for this valentines day
- paigenherbooks
- Feb 11, 2024
- 8 min read
5/5
The Beautiful & Damned is a masterpiece of a novel.
It’s witty, hilariously tragic, wholesomely depressing, and an absolute joy to read. Fitzgerald constructs a novel that is worthy of a Wuthering Heights level of toxic couples, showcasing two people grow alongside each other in the worse ways possible, reflecting much of his own troubles with his marriage to the wild and beautiful Zelda. The Beautiful & Damned is a story that is viciously relatable at times (I too don’t want to work and wish to paid for being beautiful) and takes a serious look into relationships and what love truly means.
Synopsis: Chronicling the relationship of Anthony Patch, a Harvard-educated aspiring writer, and his beautiful young wife, Gloria. While they wait for Anthony’s grandfather to die and pass his millions on to them, the young couple enjoys an endless string of parties, traveling, and extravagance.
This novel is my February Valentine Love themed read and I find that ironically funny. I have read this before, in highschool and genuinely didn’t remember a damn thing so decided to dive back in for the month of love, what better way to celebrate than reading about two toxic people who don’t get along and their dying marriage? I found it perfect. I am an avid lover of unlikable characters and their tragic backstories, so I thoroughly liked this book.
I am a huge Fitzgerald fan, Zelda & F. Scott alike. Their writing and way of living, while pouring so much of their real life into their novels is something I eat up with a silver spoon each and every time I crack one of their stories open. The Beautiful & Damned was no different. F. Scott creates this story that is so like his own that the yearning, the pain, hopelessness is coated in a digestible and engaging way of witty dialogue, quirky characters, and the motto “for the hell of it all”.
Our two main characters, Anthony Patch & Gloria Gilbert are awful for each other. Absolutely atrociously horrible for each other. Though as stories go, they fall in love and stick out their marriage to the bitter end. Their relationship is one that is destined to fail since the beginning and we as the reader know this and watch in horror as it just continues to get worse and worse.
Anthony Patch wants to do nothing yet get paid, he’s waiting for his wealthy grandfather to die so he can get his millions, he wants for nothing yet yearns for everything. He wants everything he can’t have because he genuinely believes he deserves it.
Gloria Gilbert is the prettiest girl to ever exist, men follow her wherever she goes and she is known to be a heartbreaker.
Anthony Patch seeks her out and decides he must have her, and there begins the courting process. During this Fitzgerald gives you a false sense of hope that maybe they’ll be happy…but that is quickly diminished. The reader figures out in a heartbeat that Anthony & Gloria are two people that should never be together. Both adamantly against marriage and ever settling down, become infatuated with eachother to the point they just decide to get married. Both believing they’ve found the one thing that they want, they are hopelessly in love, the honey moon phase is in full tilt.
Then it crumbles.
We follow the two as they realize that they were more beautiful when they knew nothing about each other. Anthony manic pixie dream girls Gloria to the point that she has become his muse, the one thing he truly believes that he can’t live without and if he has her he can’t be doing bad and still has something to live for. We watch as Anthony starts to get to know Gloria, deeply know her, as one does when in a marriage, and starts to see her quirks, her moments of rawness, and starts to realize she isn’t the “perfect, not like other girls” woman he thought.
Due to this, he starts to resent her and starts blaming her for every single one of his problems. She’s the reason he doesn’t have money, or can’t write, the reason he’s unhappy, the list goes on and on.
Anthony’s fatal flaw is that he doesn’t want to work for anything, including his marriage.
He expects everything and demand that everything be given to him and be easy. He just wants Gloria to revere him, to love him regardless of what he’s doing or not doing for that matter. Anthony commits so hard to his “bit” of not working and that he’s self deserving, he decides to do nothing.
Genuinely decides to do nothing and just wait for his greatness to be thrust upon him.
During this whole turmoil, Gloria is like a mirror to Anthony. She’s the only one that truly knows Anthony and proceeds to let him know. She easily becomes passive aggressive and irritable. Calling him lazy, telling him he should work that he should DO something, and starts to shrink into a depression that she is too beautiful for this kind of treatment (girls, we need to have this kind of attitude). This circle of hell that is their relationship just keeps going and going, non stop, this tragic hot and cold of hate and love, flowing and ebbing at any point, within minuets of the story. For some readers this can be annoying or boring, I on the other hand loved it. I loved seeing how fast they switched from love to hate, the dramatic flair of the eloquent way Fitzgerald describes the atrocious way they think about each other and feel towards each other.
It dives deep into a notion that both Anthony and Gloria think they are too good for their counterpart and try not to romanticize the life they could have had without each other, it brings a painful light into the reality of toxic relationships–they are not hot, they are in fact disgustingly boring, shallow, and often times right down depressing. While both these characters are awful reading about them throw their money away, party with abandon, sink into alcoholism, and becomes just even worst versions of themselves read like classical reality t.v., which has become one of my favorite sub genres of literature and the classics.
Something else that The Beautiful & Damned does well is bring about a conversation of class that is a little different than most books. We are following two well off characters who slowly dissolve into their version of “poverty”. Fitzgerald has Anthony & Gloria in this roaring 20’s atmosphere of dancing, drinking, and partying and gives them a cast of friends who are all the same. Though where the intrigue comes into play is the fact that all of their rich friends harp on Anthony, alot about doing nothing. Even though these people don’t have to do anything, they take their money and position in society to do things still. They pour money into hobbies, or investments, they travel, or fund movies, they all do something. The conversations that surround Anthony are always “why aren’t you doing anything?” it’s not even the question of doing it for the money, that though is below them, it’s the concept of not having a passion or having something that you do. Just drinking and bitching is not a full time gig in their eyes. They criticize Anthony and eventually Gloria for doing nothing, simply nothing.
This brings the question of life’s purpose.
That everyone in the novel except for Gloria and Anthony have a purpose, something they do. Gloria use to think hers was to be beautiful, but as she starts to age she starts to realize that she can’t rely solely on that as something to “do” rather than something to “be”. Anthony on the other hand rejects this notion, he avidly wants to do nothing, and sticks by that. He has such low self esteem about himself and a lackluster love of life that he wants to prove to everyone that doing nothing IS his calling, and regardless of how miserable his life gets, he doesn’t actively truly try to do anything other than drink.
Which leads me to something that I found interesting while reading this novel.
I actually relate to Anthony Patch quite a lot.
Honestly, I do.
In some ways Anthony truly thinks he has done “everything right” and deserve this outcome of wealth or simply just a “good time”, and in a lot of ways I feel the same. He’s Harvard educated, comes from a good, even great family, and has this plan that everything should go swimmingly for him; he will write, fall in love, and have a great life. Though he quickly finds that it is simply not the case. I relate to Anthony heavily in fact that I too, feel like I’ve done “everything right” and sometimes Life just simply doesn’t care. I got the degree with honors, worked full time and work hard, and still Life has a way of throwing curve balls at you to humble you or simply just take you back ten steps. Though the difference between Anthony and me is that I will be doing something to fix it, not become an alcoholic, been there done that baby.
Another thing that I find relatable to Anthony and astonishingly tragically beautiful is the fact that Anthony struggles with excessive and sometimes crippling anxiety (same.)
I find it sometimes odd yet a breath of fresh air when classics showcase their characters having these things, such as anxiety and it being a large plot point in the story. At times Anthony literally can’t get out of bed because he’s feeling so attached, so anxious, so terrified of the world outside. He can’t get out of his head and when he does all he can do is read or sit and stare at the ceiling for hours on end. He eventually finds that drinking makes him more social and quiets the terror in his mind. Having Anthony struggle with this throughout the story sometimes humanizes and makes you as a reader feel sympathy for him. That when he wants to try to be more than he wants to be or thinks he should be his brain and his anxiety cripples him. Now, that being said there are other factors why Anthony Patch doesn’t actually go do anything, but sometimes it truly is do to the fact that he feels like he can’t breath and if he leaves the house he will simply perish. As someone who also can relate to that feeling it was an unexpected but solidifying thing to read that Anthony Patch written in 1921 is just a 23 year old teenage girl like me, anxious and kinda poor.
The Beautiful & Damned is a novel of awful people simply trying to survive the 1920’s and doing a kinda shit job at it. Though within the pages of this disgusting story is moments of love, of wit, of something bigger than the story. The fact that everyone has something that they want to do, that you should do what you want, that working hard for something you want isn’t wasted time, staying inside and falling to the voices in your head is a waste of time.
That every person is born a success but makes themself a failure by not trying and giving up.
It’s also a warning, people are people, they are real, and have feelings, quirks and things that make them, them. Fall in love with who people are and not the version you think they are or the potential you see, and you won’t find yourself reminiscing this review in ten years thinking “man I should have listened to Paige’s review on The Beautiful & Damned”.
Don’t become an Anthony and Gloria Patch.
It may be beautiful but following it is the damned.
Happy Love Week 💌🥂💘
xoxo,
paige
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