West of Sunset

Christopher Lane's narration of this fascinating audiobook is elegant and engrossing. His sonorous voice is ideal for O'Nan's rich imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood. With kindness and compassion, Lane entreats the listener to empathize with Fitzgerald as he copes with personal and professional trials--his wife is institutionalized, his career a shadow of its former greatness, his grip on his own health tenuous. Lane's performance is as effective as O'Nan's storytelling. Conversations with notables such as Hemingway and Bogart come across as believable, and descriptions of setting and character quirks are vivid and three-dimensional. This audiobook is outstanding--one that might inspire you to visit the work of the great Fitzgerald himself once again. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

October 6, 2014
The last few years of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, when he lived in Hollywood (the title alludes to Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard), are the subject of this earnest but only fitfully interesting novel from O’Nan (Last Night at the Lobster). The book inadvertently illustrates the truth of Fitzgerald’s famous dictum: “There are no second acts in American lives.” Conventional wisdom has it that Fitzgerald went back to Hollywood for money—surely true with his wife, Zelda, a patient at an expensive mental hospital in North Carolina—but this novel articulates a broader rationale: “He’d come west not just for the money but to redeem his previous failures here.” There’s something touching (if slightly surreal) about the author of The Great Gatsby hoping for redemption by writing film scripts, but O’Nan’s Fitzgerald too often conjures the reader’s pity, with his desperate need for money, fame, and love—from readers and romantic interests—and his alcoholism. The plot adds romantic intrigue to the mix in the form of Sheilah Graham, the L.A. gossip columnist (like Fitzgerald, a parvenu) who became Fitzgerald’s lover. The book is thoroughly researched, featuring a huge supporting cast of famous players—Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker, among others—but it feels more like a television docudrama than a fully realized novel.