what was the last 'classic book' you got and were knocked out by?

(based on the ilm classic album equivalent. basically old books you've just discovered)

My Antonia!

I read O Pioneers for college many years ago and remember enjoying it very much, but then read a few others of hers in the meantime that I thought were just OK. Somehow overlooked My Antonia until this year, and absolutely loved it.

Since then, I also read Lucy Gayheart, which revisits the same recurring themes from her earlier works, particularly the artist from the small prairie town drawn to the big city and the internal and external conflicts that result, but something really clicked this time, although I don't think Lucy Gayheart is widely regarded as a "classic book" but oh well, it should be! Anyway, I've got four more Willa Cather novels on my shelf from a pre-pandemic book sale, so I'm very much looking forward to them.

I read a lot of old classics and I'm a tough audience for getting 'knocked out' by a book, but Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay, made me very enthusiastic. It doesn't try to directly tackle any big themes but rather is droll and wise and never strikes a single wrong note from beginning to end, and in doing so it speaks with a rare purity about life.

btw, Cather is a great choice, too!

I really like Cather, despite finding her politics more than a little questionable. I love teaching "Paul's Case" in my short fiction classes.

While only a classic in some circles, I was recently introduced to Nicole Brossard's early work via French Kiss; or a Pang's Promise. It is an incredible experimental novel, one that cements Brossard as among the great experimental writers of our times in my mind. Going to attempt to read in the original French soon.

Gulliver's Travels

I've been a Cather stan forever; more would-be's should mimic her sentence rhythms instead of Hemingway's.

Since undergrad I've read relatively little fiction, classic or otherwise, but reading James's The Portrait of a Lady recently took me back to when I thought literature was the best and purest way of making sense of and redeeming human experience (i.e., when I was about nineteen).

Oh shit, what if I still think that?

I think each experience of reading good literature lays down a layer of extra perception regarding some aspect of the world that may not have been otherwise available to the reader. Depending on the book and the reader, that new layer will vary considerably in its additional depth, but it is an accretive process and always worthwhile. Personal experience is, of course, more direct and alive, but is limited to our immediate surroundings in a way that literature is less dependent upon. I get more out literature than I do from other arts, but that is me.

This thread has caused me to realize that I seem to have practically given up trying new "classic" writers. The only book I can think of that fits this description is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, which I read some time before the start of the pandemic.

I find my thoughts similar to yours, Aimless. For me, poetry is how I make sense of the world, how I view everything in it. While I would avoid using superlatives such as 'purest,' I do think that literature is able to take me out of the world while acting as its mirror, permitting a certain understanding of human experience in the world that is perhaps more rich than in other types of media. Music has its effect, yes, but I find that music for me is often more about transcendence...lovely as that is, for me, literature is always immanent, always living and permeating everything we do.

Loads honestly - Don Quixote the other year was a big one, the prime of miss jean brodie and the lover more recently

so far in 2020, the ones that hit hardest were Eugene Onegin and especially Death's Jest-Book, which freaked me out so much the first time through I had to read it again immediately

That last me reminds me that I read Tiptree's "Slow Music" recently, as the sky slowly went dark---I've read a fair amount of Tiptree over the years, but fuuuuuuucccck

Frederick Douglass slave narrative which has been sitting unread in my copy of I Was Born A Slave vol 1 for way too long.
Book did have a pile of others on top of it since a shelf collapsed but I should've taken it out long since.

The last was hmm, probably Shirley Jackson, finding a new appreciation for that genre through her voice.

I wasn't that young, maybe in my mid-20s, when I was thoroughly knocked out by reading the Brontës for the first time. That was an all-consuming obsession that had me reading their works on every break for about a year, and it's shaped my taste and reading habits ever since. A once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing I don't expect to experience again. But I experience plenty smaller knock-outs.

Good posts on this thread, even when not seemingly answering the question. Aimless's description of literary perception I find convincing.

I can hardly recall the last classic to do this for me. I suppose I just don't read enough, and I don't read enough classics, and I reread quite a lot. But surely I can find an answer?

Perhaps, in fact, ORLANDO.

I haven't finished it yet, but Little Women is the most fun I've had reading in ages. It's perfect for slow cottage days.

I'm not a big classics reader, but The Left Hand of Darkness counts, right?

I'm hoping for this reaction when I finally get round to my copy of A Rebours (getting closer on my 'to-read' list) but that's the kind of expectation that only leads to disappointment.

I would def count The Left Hand of Darkness for quality of writing and impact on individual readers, maybe especially when it first came put: it seemed to have a searching quality behind, around and behind the close observation of imagination: "Am I the only one who feels this way? And what's really gping on?" The Dispossessed is pretty remarkable too, in a different perspective, more a collective experience: at a certain point, even or especially the most idealistic, thughtfully developed culture can start to stagnate, if---another kind of self-examination, soul-searching.Tiptree wrote some SF classics too.
I wasn't disappointed by A Rebours, though I read it in anonymous translation: helped that I was working at an indie bookstore, where the owner let me take stuff ohome every noght, to become a well-informed salesman--- for a while there, I was as much an insatiable culture vulture as Huysman's narrator. But whenever I mentioned it to non-staff, they were like "Oh yeah" too.

"behind, around and *beyond*" is what I meant.

More typos in there, sorry.

Re: Tiptree, I heard an audio drama version of 'the Screwfly Solution' maybe a year or so ago and loved it, and my BF just bought me a collection of her stories, hopefully will get round to them soon.

Love your posts table, and I'm in full agreement on the immanence of good literature. I studied psychology, so I partly think of it as a form of experiential cognitive play that fully integrates the emotions. That's that perspective: way before I enjoyed it from childhood so, apart from brief interludes when I forced myself to become more pragmatic for the sake of money/self-hood-in-the-world reasons, it is the experience that means most to me, and is a kind of revelation of "truth" that I can't do without.

I'm currently doing a masters in early modern lit/history so I hope you dont mind me saying I enjoy your published work...

Re the op question: Petrarch's sonnets (Canzoniere) - I really don't know why there aren't considered as essential as say Shakespeare, and are usually reduced to historical importance only, they are absolute genius and far more complex and difficult than the reputation of "Petrarchan love", - and Comte de Lautréamont's Maldoror, which broke my brain. Can't ask more from a book than that.

The Golden Notebook for me, I expected it to be incredibly worthy and to drag so much more than it did, in the end I devoured it in a week.

Glumdalclitch, thank you for yr kind words! And yes, the revelatory nature of good literature is very much an echo of and party to the revelatory nature of the quotidian, imho...

I do wonder what of mine you've read! Feel free to private message...

Oh. And as for the original question, two strike me as fitting, but one more than the other.

The first is Silas Marner. Found a copy of it in a free box, started reading it, and found it to be a much more enjoyable experience than I'd ever imagined it to be.

The second is a book by Christa Wolf, 'Accident: A Day's News,' which is a psychological portrait of a woman living in the German countryside in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, while in the meantime, her brother undergoes surgery for a brain tumor hundreds of kilometers away. It is considered a classic by many writers, at least, and I have to say: it is a deeply affecting book. Highly recommended.

I read old poetry all the time, most recently did a close read of 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and a load of John Clare, ever my favorite.

I dodged required reading of Silas Marner in high school, and deprived myself of Eliot for many years, until finally got to The Mill on The Floss and omg Middlemarch. Should give Silas his due, I be thinkin'.
A Rebours seemed a little silly in the translation I read, and the illustrations didn't help, but testimonial urgency came through, and point more or less taken, although I still have school myself with episodes of Hoarders.
Cather talk on this thread has gotten me back to her, more on that later.

I wrote this bit several years ago on the queerness of reading.

O Hell Yes.

Recently re-read Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog.’ Very prescient for our times, especially when the dog started spouting incoherent, popular political jargon.

Alfred - If only reading was that kind of virus.

I haven't thought about that kind of attitude in depth but maybe people feel the same way about reading in public as they do with mobile phones, as if it's rude and antisocial? Was it when other people were coming to you and wanted your attention or was it even just the idea of you reading in private?

I wonder how many people glued to mobile phones are reading books on them?

i was reading an article about shirley jackson a few nights ago and realized that i hadn't actually revisited "the lottery" since first encountering it in seventh grade, when it disturbed me so much i'm pretty sure i had nightmares about it. so i reread it. really a remarkably effective story, even if you know what to expect. the last couple of paragraphs still make my stomach lurch. also loved reading about all the hate mail the new yorker got after running it.

Just re-read The Lottery myself. Going to teach it along with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in the first week of my short fiction class this fall.

"The Lottery" was b-a-a-ck in The New Yorker recently (maybe latest issue?), a few weeks after her son was in there, talking to Elizabeth Moss about Mom (Moss was in that recent movie based on a novel about Shirley Jackson, got very mixed reviews).

Mine would probably be Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which has stayed with me and continues to worry away at various things at the back of my mind. That and O Pioneers! I must read more Cather.

I tend to organise myself and my thoughts (if those things are different) through reading as well: it helps me think, essentially - might even be 'how I think'. Seamus Heaney put it well: "We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves... What is at work in the most original and illuminating poetry is the mind's capacity to conceive a new place of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity".

Ugh I should've started asking for book recommends in this thread and not the thread where we're talking about authors we avoid

I've mostly been reading books written by friends these days, they've all been great but impossible for me to be objective about. I'm gonna re-read Borges collected fiction starting this evening

Never a bad time to read Borges! Or Cheever for that matter. If you're after short fiction: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson if you've not read it. It is a thing of wonder.

Oooooh this looks good. Thanks for the recommendation!!!!

Last week I described my taste in books as English 201 haha

Fgti, have you read Gass? Heart of the Heart of the Country is essential, imho

the stories of kleist; among which earthquake in chile, michael kolhaas, the foundling and marquise of o are some of the best things i've ever read.

Seconded, Kleist's short stories are marvellous. Nothing else I've read by him gets on the same level.

Heartburn, for the pleasure and Wodehouse-level density of jokes

Two Serious Ladies, for the voice

Rereading Seamus Deane on Joyce. Insight and intellect but also, as always, sometimes gnomic to the point of meaning very little.

Apologies: that was for the What Are You Reading thread?

Joyce knocked me out, but not Deane.

i asked this and never answered it and it's nearly the time of year where i pick something foreign and enormous to read so it's on my mind

Les Mis was great, all the things i like about Dickens but with a French twist. lots of memorable set pieces. didn't like the digressions - here are 3 chapters about the different kinds of nuns, here are 9 about the Napoleonic war...

similarly the Count Of Monte Cristo, the injustice, the prison, the reversal of fortune and using that to extract a slow revenge. bit too slow in parts 2 and 3 tbh, but 4 and 5 picked it up again.

shorter, and English, but probably the one, is Hardy's Tess. again the injustice burns all the way through this, the second half, the winter turnip picking, is bleak, the revenge self-destructive.

torn as to what to pick this year though. Anna K last year was a slight let down which has kind of put me off attempting War and Peace. i have Life and Fate but that might be too modern. Musketeers? Hunchback? given that the French have impressed me (also loved Toilers)?

The ONce and Future King though it does have some hangovers from a less enlightened age plus I did have it hanging around for an age.
Meant to read it for ages too.
BUt enjoying so far, though possibly not so much the Robin Wood bit.
ah well

I've heard about the Count of Monte Cristo being a great novel but not the most coherent or consistent.
I think it was written in parts spread out over a monthly or whatever magazine. Which may have been a bit of a norm at the time.
Does UMberto Eco have an article on the nature of the text in one of his collections, I know I've come across somebody like that writing about it.

I like some aspects of Dickens, but he's not good at writing women, and he's also unfair to his female characters in a way that really rankles with me. Our Mutual Friend would be such a great book imo if not for the ending; the idea of everyone in Bella's life putting on an elaborate act in order to trick her into falling in love with someone is horrifying.

Trollope, otoh, is amazing at writing women, and he's also able to veer away from the traditional marriage-plot when he thinks it would make more sense for the character to stay single.

yes, i love Dickens, but it is very true that his hatred for women shines through in his novels.

Trollope clearly appreciated women. i do think they suit very different reading moods, and i love them both.

The women in Trollope have the money and know how to administer it.

> read war and peace this summer. p good, it turns out

ade edmondson, of all people, was raving about it recently. he had to read it for work, wasn't expecting to enjoy it.

> I will always recommend The Last Chronicle of Barset

it's been on the list, and my kobo, along with the other one, since your last recommendation. but it's a long list (and yes, maybe too english (and maybe too short, but i could read both))

Oh, cool! Sorry for repeating myself - I get very evangelical when it comes to Trollope, clearly.

Last year at some point I read Slaughterhouse Five.. never was a Vonnegut fan but I read this at the right time, really really sucked me in.

20 pages into Tristram Shandy and this is a knock out.

Just wait until he tells you all about his life and times!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Wish I'd read this years ago, its so fantastic.

> read war and peace this summer. p good, it turns out

ade edmondson, of all people, was raving about it recently. he had to read it for work, wasn't expecting to enjoy it.

― koogs, Friday, February 19, 2021 7:01 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

He plays a father figure in a BBC version from about 4 or 5 years ago which was pretty good

There is an event hosted by the English department at the university I used to teach at called Dead Writers, where you dress up and read a three-minute passage from a dead writer's work. My cousin and I did a performance a few years ago where we cut The Yellow Wallpaper down to three minutes. I wore a nightgown and read out loud, while in the background my cousin played the woman in the wallpaper: first she held up an opaque length of ugly yellow cloth and just kind of moved around behind it, then she dropped it to reveal herself wrapped in a lot of yellow tulle, then at the end she dropped the tulle and was wearing a yellow bikini and yellow go-go boots (made by us with lots of yellow duck tape) and then we both crawled offstage. It was a big hit.

Lol, brilliant

Last fall, after reading Casey Cep's energetic, in-depth profile of Marilynne Robinson and a startling, instantly engaging excerpt of Jack, both in The New Yorker, I proceeded to Gilead and the rest of that cycle to date.

neglected thread

The Old Man And The Sea was as good as they say it is

I'm not sure if Infinite Jest counts but it's certainly heavy enough to do the trick. I was absolutely floored. Left its mark on me for a while afterwards.

It's been a little over a year since I read it, but House of Mirth, Edith Wharton. She crushed it.

Is should also mention The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson, where so much was happening 'between the lines' that I had to stop reading at least once every page or so to absorb it all. Amazing stuff.

Madame Bovary (tr. Davis). Boredom is powerful stuff!

Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy.

Before that Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, tr. Tina Nunnally. Deserves to be better known though a 1000 page novel about a 14th century norwegian woman is obviously not going to fly off the shelves.

Classic. THink it has to be

Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dogsbody which I onoy got to read a couplle of weeks ago. Though I think I had seen teh studio Ghibli animation

Federici Caliban & The Witch book on feminism and the Witch Trials very good book though I'm still wondering best way to navigate text with so many reference points to endnotes. Efficiently without interrupting reading flow like. & most of teh endnotes were significant not just citation.

C Willett Cunnington's Handbook of English costume in the nineteenth century so much so that I think I want to get a permanenet reference copy.

Country music originals : the legends and the lost Tony Russell,
2010 so may not be old enough to be classic though the contents certainly are. Again something I want to get a personal copy of.

Is the idea of classic book time directed as in book needs to be over 25 years old? Cos I think that was the way that the music thread worked.

I'm just finishing an anthology of Linda Nochlin's articles including Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? which itself was from 1971 so the standalone book should be included. I read that before I got the anthology.

> Is the idea of classic book time directed as in book needs to be over 25 years old?

it's just a mirror of the 'classic album' thread on ilm. nobody's going to be arrested by the thread police for posting never books. that said, it shouldn't just be a 'what are you reading?' or 'what have you bought recently?' thread, because we have those.

Either The Count of Monte Cristo or Little Women. Both masterpieces in very different ways.

Left hand of darkness. Works as a book of ideas, works as a book of beautiful sentences, and works as a kickass survival adventure. And so spookily modern on modern-day right wing politics.

The Scarlet Letter. Really enjoying Hawthorne's writing, so far.

Truly feel like that book is lost on the young in the US— I had to read it in my junior or senior year of high school, and even as a bookish and nerdy gay teenager, I loathed the experience from start to finish.

one of the most "yeah, i get it, please stop" books of all time

It's like Ethan Frome in that way (and Wharton wrote way better novels).

I majored in English literature, but I got burned out on it and, after receiving my degree, have mostly stuck to musician memoirs/oral histories, horror, and sci-fi when I read at all. However, a used book shop opened up in my neighborhood recently, so I stopped in the other day to check it out. Picked up a collection of O. Henry stories. I think I had encountered him maybe once before, and possibly as far back as high school, rather than college.

one of the most "yeah, i get it, please stop" books of all time

― adam t (dat), Sunday, 16 February 2025 bookmarkflaglink

I love this quality. The sense of suffocation. Allows for the child to be the light through. Beautiful book but it would be crazy to read this before 25 or so.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie might be too recent (2013) to properly be considered "classic," but the 2022 reissue I own and just finally got around to reading speaks to its status as a landmark of trans literature. One of the novel's two protagonists, a trans woman named Maria, speaks and even thinks in what I would characterize as a highly self-conscious post-millennial style familiar from blogs and particular corners of social media, and which I suspect was intended as at least quasi-satirical (I did laugh quite a bit, at least). The novel's other protagonist, a teenage stoner questioning his gender identity (and by extension, what it says about his sexuality) is disaffected and monosyllabic to the point of, again, comic exaggeration, but it occurs to me that this is a novel about language as much as it is about anything else--about a hyperactively verbal character at one point in their life as a trans woman giving someone the language to figure out their own identity and desires. A quasi "road" novel, it also has a healthy dose of 70's style existentialism: without giving anything away, I found its anticlimax of an ending surprisingly moving.

reading back through this thread, me wanting French recommendations. in the meantime I've read lots more Hugo and started on Zola. i have muskateers saga lined up as well (which is 1000s of pages in total, 4 or 5 or 6 books depending on edition)

but the one that stands out, the one that bubbles up in my mind time and again, is The Man Who Laughs.

and as it happens, the last Barsetshire book that was recommended is up next having read the previous 5 in the last couple of years. but i have a feeling it'll be my last Trollope. (they've been ok but 6 or 7 is enough, especially as this one's over 700 pages. they have also been spoilt somewhat by the terrible quality control of the penguin classics editions)

I'm going to put in a good word for a small classic that struck me as nearly perfect in its quiet way, Turgenev's novella First Love in the translation by Isaiah Berlin.

after reading the bostonians because i found it at hand, and after finally finishing it thinking "huh, henry james kinda sucks ass," i went looking for opinions round hear about james. i saw mr soto praise "portrait of a lady" in some way, and thought welp, it must be pfg, and now i'm well along in it. and it is great. the characters are interesting not tedious, the humor is really funny. it's like it was written 50 years later. it seems like the same author in vocab and sentence structure, but different and waaaaaay better in all other ways.

the humor in bostonians was there but the story and characters were so false and irritating that soon nothing was funny to me. just like irl.

Jonathan Rose intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Been meaning to read it for a couple of decades possibly since reading reviews when it was released. He looks back at things like self education through books. How contents were distributed through reading aloud to groups or at the workplace. Weavers would set up books next to their looms and be reading while working since this could be done semi automatically. Also there being a lot of group discussion on the workfloor.
I'm not sure if it is a classic per se cause not sure exactly what criteria for designation is. It's about 25 years old and I think recognised as a classic study.
Certainly finding it a rewarding read. Just going to take a while cos it's my current bathroom book and it is a few hundred pages long.

after reading the bostonians because i found it at hand, and after finally finishing it thinking "huh, henry james kinda sucks ass," i went looking for opinions round hear about james. i saw mr soto praise "portrait of a lady" in some way, and thought welp, it must be pfg, and now i'm well along in it. and it is great. the characters are interesting not tedious, the humor is really funny. it's like it was written 50 years later. it seems like the same author in vocab and sentence structure, but different and waaaaaay better in all other ways.

the humor in bostonians was there but the story and characters were so false and irritating that soon nothing was funny to me. just like irl.

― beige accent rug (Hunt3r),

Hi! I love The Bostonians. Basil Ransome and Olive Chancellor mutually irritating each other in the first chapter is kinda hilarious.

I also love The Bostonians because as Alfred says, it's frequently very funny, deplores all of the major characters, and ends extremely ambiguously even for Henry James.

Ill admit thst structurally it has problems. The middle section is attenuated; he hadn’t learned yet how to twitter and stammer exquisitely in a character's consciousness.

olive chancellor is such a joyless drudge that i kept hoping there’d be some kind of revelation about her interior life that made her existence not a futile misery. that was one thing. the novel’s characterization of the lives and hopes of early progressives and of post-abolitionists was interesting. its depiction of the traits of activist culture were lol eternal, and its display of journalism culture (pre-figuring social media culture) was uh also predictive? but these could not save that story for me.

Chuck Eddy Stairway To Hell
finally got this recently. Had heard about it at the time of release or I think at least time of reissue/expansion.
Irreverent view of some hard rocking gems. Writing style reminds me of Byron Coley. & what he's including in a list of greatest heavy metal records of all time is really idiosyncratic.
Some of the entries are almost laugh out loud funny.
Anyway, some of these items need to be listened to. & as a list of eclectic hard rock etc this having been released in 91 then 98 hopefully did work as a guide to some.
Pretty dashed fine.

i’ve always meant to read it, but it’s not in my home music genres, and i fear i’ll be some kind of critical tourist, or that i just won’t know the references. i think my next steps to do it are easy and clear tho, and soooo ? maybe+ as usual. glad to be reminded for sure.

I think the only revelation about Olive are her sublimated, repressed feelings for Verena (who's the biggest blank, necessarily).

I need to get Chuck's books.

I had to remind myself of the final sentences in The Bostonians [lol SPOILERS]:

'Ah, now I am glad!' said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.

That's classic enough for me.

you’re right about verena, a cipher.
and yeah, i thought the whole emotional amorous subtext of olive/verena was absurd and practically text and now i want a modern interview with james asking him his ideas about what he intended and what he felt he could and could not do. i mean even as a bland cis het fellow i was like :-/. and what if it’s all just in my head, i suppose?

how do romantic or even romance-y writers view PoaL and isabel/goodwood finale (beavis snicker)? it got way more intense and i had thought it would. and effectively so for me. more than i had expected for james, he want pretty all in. i thought it actually not bad. anyway overall i liked it.

i loved the character of the countess, that was good shit imo.

He reached a peak with POAL in writing three-dimensional supporting characters in the realist vein: Henrietta, Ralph, of course. Even the Countess Gemini's big reveal -- the stuff of melodrama -- comes across convincingly. What's the line? "Oh, my dear Isabel, with you one must dot one's i's!"

Maybe I'll finally read The Bostonians over the holidays.

Pop. 1280

That's a great one.

Dunno if it's now or ever been considered a classic---initially, a commercial and critical disappointment---but I was recently knocked out by re-reading Tender Is The Night , despite remembering almost nothing, except the young dandy whose rich father pleads with Dr. Diver to cure the gay---reply: can't do that, and wouldn't if I could. Pretty good for 1932, and maybe one of the reasons Fitz didn't please his audience as much as comfidently intended. Also: he's a pathologist of the privileged American male, stepping back to admire his own work and letting the reader see better, draw own conclusions---he never oversells (although occasionally I can't understand his comments, the ones with so many wry bendr semi-private musings)(but even these have a good effect: hairline fractures in the pellucid view, under the glass, somewhat pre-Cheeveresque)(and I was already reminded of Cheever by one of the teen stories in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I posted about on ancient WAYR)
Also: Dr. Diver eventually starts to seem like a forerunner of Richard Matheson's protagonist in The Shrinking Man (filmed, pretty faithfully, as The Incredible Shrinking Man: no such thing as a lowest point---or so it seems, with both authors periodically opening the valves for blasts of peril---which can seem random, in Diver's case, and maybe his contemporaries didn't like that. But even as his personal relations and attitudes deteriorate, he still responds to public crisis scenes like a good medical citizen---for a while.

This book keeps coming back through my head like a boxcar, and now it occurs to me that when he's first seen, though the lovestruck eyes of teen movie starlet Rosemary, as the host with the most, that he's treating his friends, family, servants, house, grounds, as he would his patients, in his heyday.

In his Max Perkins bio, A. Scott Berg says that Fitzgerald used Zelda's letters and case history, and that she was set back by this. It's unforgivable, and yet it works: the rest of the book could have been eclipsed, but isn't not, at all. And Nicole's view of her shrink(ing)-husband becomes very sharp, very accurate, as much as one person can be about another.
(one thing about that: Scott must have known that one can't just think their way out of clinical mental-emotional patterns---at least, he wrote to one of Zelda's doctors---"though a first-year medical student could express it better"---that he perceived a metabolic component to her problems.)(But as always, incl. in many ways I can't mention w/o spoilers, he lets us fill in the gaps, no matter how much he says.)

Something else I can't yet forget: When Sara Murphy was venting about people thinking that she was the basis for Nicole, John O'Hara told her that no matter what Scott got from real people, "they always become Fitzgerald characters in the Fitzgerald world." (shudder)

he young dandy whose rich father pleads with Dr. Diver to cure the gay---reply: can't do that, and wouldn't if I could. Pretty good for 1932,