The former paints Zelda as the neurotic wife who burrowed into Scott and broke him down like a rampant strain of ivy. In a concluding note, Fowler characterizes Fitzgerald biography as a “raging argument” between Team Scott and Team Zelda. Griffith, who along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had recently formed a company called United Artists.” It’s weaker when Zelda has to play the diligent footnoter of her own life: “I’d soon learn that this Mr. The novel is liveliest when Zelda expresses wonder in the moment, and when the distinctive voice Fowler has given her shines through - all “fellas” and dropped g’s. A wistful tone distances Zelda from the frenzy of her past, but the retrospective structure dulls the energy of this inherently gripping story, in which a naive girl slowly wakes up to the double bind of being her husband’s muse. Therese Anne Fowler’s “Z” is narrated by Zelda in Montgomery, shortly before Scott’s death in 1940 - during a calm hiatus between her confinements in mental institutions. What they did, said and felt on that occasion was written down by both of them, torn up and rewritten many times over the course of lives devoted to self-mythologizing and, later, self-defense.Įven as “The Great Gatsby” tops the bestseller list in anticipation of the Leonardo DiCaprio movie version, three new novels reimagine the marriage and the myth that sprang from this meeting. His superiors at Camp Sheridan might finally ship him out to a winding-down war, or Scribner’s might agree to publish his novel - and while he waited, he welcomed the distraction of a vivacious local belle. Zelda Sayre was 17 when she met Scott Fitzgerald, a green-eyed Yankee from Princeton, at a military ball in Montgomery, Ala., the town she ruled like a princess.
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