read: the last tycoon
Even discounting its unfinished narrative, Fitzgerald's final fragment of a novel suffers from the usual deficiencies of his non-Gatsby oeuvre—or perhaps, more aptly, the inability of his non-Gatsby work to sustain the author's moonlight-cold voice. To wit: the chronology of events is problematic; the writing is frequently fussy and mannered; and the characters are as staged and distant as mannequins. There's passing beauty and occasional incisiveness here, particularly in scenes involving the inner workings of the film biz, but the story as a whole, or subset thereof, never gels.