Involuntary Celibacy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise

In the course of reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise I cannot say that the first nine chapters of the book made very much impression on me--but it all came together for me in the tenth, when we see what it all led up to, the disillusionment of a once romantic youth facing reality in a way he had never done before, even amid the horrors of the Western Front. It all comes to a head when he finds himself taking a long drive with the father of a friend of his from Princeton who, unlike Amory, did not come back from the killing fields of World War I.

In the course of that dialogue Amory declares that "I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her," all as working men are "condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence" for the larger part of their youth "to give some man's son an automobile."

It is a striking statement, certainly from the vantage point of a century on in which the terms of political discourse have changed so profoundly. These days what passes for the left (as with the status politics-defined pseudo-liberals) chastises such young men as Amory spoke of for feeling frustrated, for daring to speak of an inequality of chances in this area of life, even for thinking of such things at all. Meanwhile some on the right profess sympathy for their frustration--but tell them the causes are anything and everything but the socioeconomic inequalities of "the system," the defense of the inequalities of which, after all, have been the raison d'etre of the right from the start (with the same, frankly, going for what most Americans are prone to call "left").

Naturally I wonder what people make of the passage these days when they read it. But then that's just it--people don't read much these days, do they? And of those who do read, few are likely to read a book like this one all the way down to the end with the kind of alertness that would have them noticing the passage, and thinking about what it has to say.