Modern literature is full of fun novels in which the author makes use of historical figures, seamlessly blending pop culture icons with fictional characters: “Ragtime” and “The March,” by E.L. Doctorow; “Shoeless Joe,” by W.P. Kinsella; “Libra,” by Don Delillo; and “The Cold Six Thousand,” by James Ellroy. Coloradan Dan Simmons got in on the act when he reanimated Ernest Hemingway for “The Crook Factory.”
Making historical figures like Hemingway or Lee Harvey Oswald come to life as a fictional character can be a tough task, and novelist Caroline Preston (“Jackie by Josie,” “Lucky Crocker 2.0”) plays it smart by making use of a young F. Scott Fitzgerald and the girl who apparently became his life lifelong love, Ginevra King, in her first novel, “Gatsby’s Girl.”
Preston tells the fairly simple, straightforward story of the romance that sprang up between Chicago debutante Ginevra (who, as the book opens, has already broken one boy’s heart) and the lower-class Fitzgerald when the two meet at a dance in St. Paul, Minn.
Ginevra is attending the mixer at the behest of her Westover prep-school roommate, Marie Hart. For reasons that may always remain unknown, Ginevra captured Fitzgerald’s heart so completely that he based many of his female characters on her, including Daisy Buchanan, of “The Great Gatsby.”
Their romance begins that weekend and continues – albeit in an epistolary fashion – for six months. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, the shallow and fickle Ginevra quickly tires of him, already growing bored of the future famous writer the first summer she heads home from school. Fitzgerald’s attempt to woo her back in a visit to her parent’s mansion in late summer is recounted in painful detail. Attracted to the handsome and well-bred Billy Granger, Ginevra ends up marrying the young aviator.
After having a second child, Ginevra finds herself regretting her marriage to Granger even as the couple settles in Chicago, becoming part of the social scene. Bored, Ginevra begins reading the books of her one-time beau and discovers her fictional doppelganger in Josephine Perry, Daisy Buchanan and Isabel Borge. None of the portrayals are particularly flattering, as Fitzgerald uses these women as examples of what his protagonists should avoid. Though she continues to track the lives of Fitzgerald and his glamorous wife, Zelda, as Fitzgerald spirals further down into alcoholism, Ginevra continues, for the most part, to be a model of self-absorption`.
Preston’s writing is clean, concise and admirably sharp, and the subject matter of such a beguiling affair – not to mention the meta-fictional notion of character discovering herself as a character – makes for fascinating material.
What’s more, Preston makes fine use of it all in “Gatsby’s Girl,” a wonderfully elegiac novel that evokes the tenor and times of the “Lost Generation,” and her marvelous re-creation of Fitzgerald and his lifetime love lend the novel the weight of a historical document. Still, one can’t help wishing that the author had taken her character of Ginevra and given her a riskier turning out. As it is, the self-centered Ginevra doesn’t quite seem like a worthy protagonist for a writer of Preston’s proven abilities.
Kansas City freelancer Dorman T. Shindler is also the editor of “The Best of Philip Jose Farmer.”
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Gatsby’s Girl
By Caroline Preston
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $24
