The Rich Boy by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Rich Boy Reviews

• 
  Paula Mota

  3,5*
  
  “Se eu escrevesse sobre os irmãos dele, teria de começar por atacar todas as mentiras que os pobres contaram sobre os ricos e as que os ricos contaram acerca deles próprios. Eles erigiram um bastião de tal modo complexo que, quando pegamos num livro sobre os ricos, o nosso instinto alerta-nos de imediato para a irrealidade com que iremos deparar."
  
  Não sei se é verdade que o dinheiro não traz felicidade, mas esse chavão aplica-se realmente a este deprimente conto de F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ainda assim, não foi a história do pobre menino rico que parece perdido ou que acha que tudo lhe é dado de bandeja que mais me angustiou, mas sim a passagem do tempo sobre este frívolo protagonista. Sempre que havia a indicação de um salto temporal, ficava com a ideia de que se tinham passado décadas e que Anson Hunter era já um velho acabado, quando na verdade ainda não chegara aos 30 anos. Mérito deste grande escritor, sem dúvida.
  
  “Julgo que ele era incapaz de ser feliz a menos que alguém estivesse apaixonado por ele e se mostrasse atraído por ele como a limalha de ferro por um íman, sem reservas, prometendo-lhe tudo.”
• 
  Tracy

  Out of his collections of short stories, “The Rich Boy” is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best pieces. Today the tale might be called a short novella; it has also been deemed a psychological study of the advantaged. It is the story of a young man born into wealth and how he responds to love, relationships and issues of money and status within his upper-class, 5th Avenue inner-circle.
  
  Fitzgerald begins by depicting rich people almost as if they are a separate race – “they are different,” the narrator explains:
  
  “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are… Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”
  
  Fitzgerald made the art of characterization seem easy. He molds his characters quickly as if with a painter’s brush, so that I feel I know them perfectly. Their gestures, body-language and thought processes flow smoothly from the palette, yet his people are not boring stereotypes. Indeed, Fitzgerald himself had this to say about characterization:
  
  “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.”
  
  The main character in “The Rich Boy,” Anson Hunter, grows up having an English governess so that he and his siblings learn a certain way of speaking that resembles an English accent and is preeminent to middle and even upper-class American children. Thus, the people around him know he is superior – they know he is rich by just looking at him.
  
  The tension of the story begins right away – with Anson's fitful love for Paula, and an iffy engagement, tinged with the kind of alcoholism that deviously thwarts everything in sight. Anson is a man who lives in separate worlds during the glittering, glamorous, roaring 20’s - before the crash, when everything seems impossibly affordable – big houses, flashy cars, Ritzy nights on the town. Fitzgerald’s settings are bewitching. Today some of the vernacular might sound old fashioned, yet, the efficient punch of its delivery stands as a first-rate testament to the writer’s craft!
  
  Everything about Anson creates tension. Even his wealth and his absolute capability cause apprehension. Then, the awful hold that alcohol has on him and the maddening indecision it creates between Anson and a real commitment to Paula - or any woman. Finally, the way Anson goes about counseling all of the young couples in his “circle” yet cannot maintain a lasting relationship of his own. This compulsive will to verify himself as a moral, respectable, mature man of New York society by patching up difficulties in other marriages proves to be an irreparable flaw in Anson’s character. This conflict builds up to a sad denouement when Anson begins dutifully setting about putting an end to the illicit affair of his uncle’s wife, Edna. And when his machinations turn out badly, Anson takes no responsibility for the tragedy.
  
  I want to like Anson even as I realize that underneath all of his glamour and devotion to high society and tradition of family posterity, he is really suffering inside with alcoholism. This handicap, or tragic flaw, gains my sympathy. However, Anson’s ultimate indecision in regards to commitment and real love, his hyper-vigilant need to interfere in the affairs of others, begins to strike me as infuriating - and of course, this very lapse in character adds to the tension of the story.
  
  Fitzgerald’s propensity for describing a bar-scene at the Yale Club or the Plaza Hotel became thematic to his tales and, upon further reading, takes on a recurring vignette from one tale to the next. Yet, I find myself lapping up these settings that involve stylish bars and hotels; because, they are so well articulated, from the clever dialogue at the bar with a bartender or drinking-companion, to the colorful yet moody renderings, to the inevitable infatuation with glamorous women and the way these motifs affect Fitzgerald’s heroes.
  
  I think of A Moveable Feast by Hemmingway all throughout Fitzgerald’s short story; because, in Hemmingway’s novel he describes Fitzgerald’s terrible weakness for alcohol. I also think of The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, perhaps because of its detached yet familial narrative style.
  
  Fitzgerald, in a style all his own, offers shocks of unexpected sensitivity and wisdom, which seem somehow surprising. As when the narrator is relating Anson’s inner-response to a well-contrived letter from someone who loves him.
  
  “Like most compromises, (the letter) had neither force nor vitality but only a timorous despair.”
  
  What I find interesting about this story, and others by Fitzgerald, is the writer’s way of inserting the narrator as an acting character at various points. The story of Anson Hunter is told from a first-person, omniscient point of view; yet, I am always cognizant of the voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald telling his own story about the loves and losses that he experienced in his own dramatic life. As when Anson falls in love, there is the distinct feeling that Fitzgerald is giving an intimate account of his own foibles in love and the passions and alcoholic histrionics that occurred in his infamous marriage to his wife, Zelda.
  
  I almost worship the writer’s vocabulary and his way of forming a phrase, such as – “rapt holy intensity” when describing the lovers. Or Anson and Paula’s “emasculated humor:” I found this such an apt way of describing the initial repartee that occurs between two people who are falling in love inside their own profound, yet rather childish, bubble.
  
  “Nevertheless, they fell in love – and on her terms. He no longer joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto bar, and whenever they were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on both sides of immature and even meaningless statements…”
  
  Fitzgerald was contracted to write screenplays for Hollywood at two separate stages of his career, though he contemptuously viewed it as “whoring.” The author inserts himself briefly, however lightly-concealed, into Anson’s life:
  
  “…one (friend) was in Hollywood writing continuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.”
  
  Thus the interweaving of fiction and autobiography! The glamor and infamous history of the writer himself affects the impact of his tales; yet, whether a reader knows about the writer’s life or not, Fitzgerald’s works are treasures!
  
• 
  Steven

  This collection includes three stories - The Rich Boy, The Bridal Party, and The Last of the Belles - as well as a very nice introduction by John Updike, who shares the history of a little spat between Fitzgerald and Hemingway that was apparently instigated by a line in The Rich Boy. This line, which according to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli is one of Fitzgerald's "most promiscuously misquoted sentences", is about the rich and reads: “They are different from you and me.” Hemingway, in his story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, has his main character muse the following in a stream of consciousness:
  
  

  The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, 'The rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

  
  Fitzgerald responded in a short but, I think, brilliant letter:
  

  Dear Ernest,
  Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

  
  Oh, how I love Scott. The actual, complete passage in The Rich Boy is this:
  

  Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

  
  Aside from all this, The Rich Boy is a great story and can be seen as an extension of The Great Gatsby in its examination of the interplay between wealth and character. The Bridal Party is also very good, and contains a significant amount of material from Fitzgerald's life. I did not care as much for the The Last of the Belles, but, and this I have stated before and will probably repeat until the end: as with any of Fitzgerald's stories, it is worth reading.
• 
  Cathérine

  3 1/2
• 
  Aleksandra

  When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow”, I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agree to conceal.
  
  This was pretty much the only interesting thing about the story. I like this quote a lot.
  
  I read The Rich Boy because episode 7 of Banana Fish is titled after this story. For the most part, I think it’s because of that above mentioned quote. There is almost nothing in common between Yut-Lung Lee (Banana Fish) and Anson Hunter (The Rich Boy).
  
  I didn’t expect to like the hero and I didn’t. Anson comes from the old money and he makes himself even richer. He’s arrogant and haughty. His story might have been interesting if there were any point in it. There wasn’t. I don’t know why F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it, but the tale about “unhappy rich boy” isn’t appealing.
  
  My main issue however lies not with Anson, who’s rich and powerful and nothing bad happens to him in the end, despite his unsavory actions. I dislike how F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays women. All of the women are seen as pretty accessories to a man. It’s condescending and belittling.
  
  All in all, apart from that quote, I didn’t like anything.
• 
  Alex

  "Νομίζω ότι δεν μπορούσε να νιώσει ευτυχισμένος παρά μόνο δίπλα σε κάποια γυναίκα που να'ναι ερωτευμένη μαζί του και να αντιδρά στην γοητεία του όπως τα ρινίσματα του σιδήρου στον μαγνήτη, που να τον βοηθά να κατανοήσει τον εαυτό του, που να του υπόσχεται κάτι. Τι ήταν αυτό δεν ξέρω. Ίσως ότι θα υπήρχαν πάντα γυναίκες στον κόσμο πρόθυμες να διαθέσουν τις πιο λαμπερές, ζείδωρες, σπάνιες ώρες τους περιθάλποντας και διαφυλάσσοντας την ανωτερότητα που έτρεφε τόσο βαθιά στην καρδιά του."
  
  Αν υπάρχει κάποιος που μπορεί να κάνει μια κοινωνική κριτική πάνω στον τρόπο ζωής και λειτουργίας της αστικής αριστοκρατικής τάξης της Νέας Υόρκης των '20s χωρίς να πλατειάσει και να κουράσει ανελέητα, αυτός είναι ο Fitzgerald. Τα χαρακτηριστικά της δικής του ζωής που έχουν ενσωματωθεί στο βιβλίο πάμπολλα, η πένα του ουσιώδης, ακριβής,πλούσια και πλήρης στον τρόπο που αποτυπώνει τα γνωρίσματα της εποχής. Ένα μικρό κείμενο κοινωνικού σχολιασμού στην ζωή που μάλλον αγάπησε να μισεί, προσωπικά πολύ πληρ��στερο του "μεγάλου Γκάτσμπυ" και ας χάνει σε έκταση. Εξαιρετικός, ίσως ο καλύτερος της χαμένης γενιάς λογοτεχνών του αμερικανικού μεσοπολέμου.
  
  Τρομακτικές οι ομοιότητες με την πραγματικότητα του καθενός μας, προφανώς σε συναισθηματική βάση και όχι υλική. Η μετάφραση αψεγάδιαστη επίσης. Διαβάστε το. (Ευχαριστώ για την πρόταση, ρωγμή).
• 
  Chris

  Where Gatsby explores the concept of wealth and class from the point of view of the outsider---for no matter how much wealth Gatsby amasses, no matter how lavish his parties, no matter how desired his company, he will never be truly accepted because, as Fitzgerald hammers home in this novella just like he did in Gatsby---the rich are different than we are. Even if they lose their wealth, they are still different. The distinction goes deeper than bank account balances. It is a more existential thing, more caste than cash.
  
  The Rich Boy is the anti-Gatsby. He is the insider. The dissolute rich boy incapable of feeling anything beyond his drive for idealized states of being---for him it is the idea of love, not love itself, or any emotion really, that drives him. Where Gatsby shows us how the wealthy damage and toy with the “common” people---The Rich Boy shows us how they damage themselves, even if they lack the ability to truly feel it.
  
  
• 
  Daisy Ella

  Basically just a collection of sob storys about rich, white males in the 1920s who experience minor inconveniences in their lives and feel the need to go off the rails and cry a bit after being rejected by women. Also fuck F Scott Fitzgerald.
• 
  Laura

  Fitzgerald writes best when he hews close to what he knows: privileged society men whose personal misfortunes stem primarily from misapprehending some key life wisdom. For Gatsby, it was that his Daisy was but a whisper of the past (incidentally, Judy Jones in 'Winter Dreams' serves a similar purpose, although more flesh-and-blood yet with less likability); for Anson of 'The Rich Boy', it was that a woman would, if pushed, marry another rich boy. Fitzgerald's writing here is more observational, as if documenting the excesses of one of his Princeton peers from school. 'The Rich Boy' succeeds in its subtlety, and comes alive in the detail: Anson's subtle social denouement, from being a confidant to his newly-married Yale friends to being a forgotten piece of furniture in their lives. Gatsby never had detail like this.
  
  And yet Fitzgerald's great success lies in telling age-old stories using beautiful prose and beautiful people, with plenty of bombast. 'The Rich Boy' lacked the golden lacquer that elevated Gatsby (which was written earlier; 'The Rich Boy' was written while Gatsby was waiting to be published, and clearly is an extension of the themes raised in the novel.) For lovers of Gatsby, perhaps this book serves as a fitting extension of Jay Gatsby's world and a thoughtful imagining of what an associate of his might look like up close.
  
  'Winter Dreams' is another partygoer to the Gatsby fête. Think of it as a thought experiment: "What if Gatsby pursued Jordan Baker?" 'Absolution' is probably the most screwball of the three, obtuse and interesting (given that the 'hero' of the story is a young boy, confessing to a priest), but writing about obsessive Catholic meditations (the theme of being profane at communion, eg) is much better executed by not-quite-contemporary Graham Greene.
• 
  Ben

  "They are different from you and me."
  
  This is the centerpiece of Fitzgerald's novella. It's a trap. People start comparing themselves to the rich, as "you and me", and naturally, not being rich, we see the negative differences. They are pompous (because we are not). They are spoiled (and we are not). Etcetera. As empirically hypocritical as it is, like any bigotry, it is blinding. There is absolutely nothing unbiased or fair about comparing the rich and the not rich so I doubt we'll ever realize the true difference in human quality, if any.
  
  Fitzgerald does exploit Anson Hunter's superiority complex. Because of economic power, a kind of factual superiority, Anson is taught, or nurtured, that normalcy is being sought after and envied. The question raised for me from the story is this: Is this Anson's fault? So often we see poor people as victims of their inherited circumstance. Can rich people be victimized as well?
  
  Anson doesn't settle down, though he wants to. His friends and acquaintances marry and start lives while he never takes that step. And what hurts him most is that he is not wanted as he was as a child. He has no method of coping with the idea that a woman would want to marry someone other than him. And he entertains an affair in which he has no interest just to bolster his own sense of superiority.
  
  And after all this, and he is left behind, we, as readers, might feel sympathetic for him. We might even see him as a victim of his inherited circumstance. Because we know the kind of life that he has lead, with its depressions, and unless he changes, which he won't, he's doomed to sink over and over.
  
  But how is that different from you and me?
• 
  Alex Sarll

  Because summer's kiss is fading, and even when you're not a great enthusiast for summer, that always evokes a certain melancholy, I felt the need for some Fitzgerald. But not Tender is the Night, not yet, because once I've read that there are no more novels. And my mammoth selection of his shorts is wonderful, but not really something to slip in one's pocket and read in the twilight by the waterside, or perching in the acid grassland, so finding this slim edition of three stories in the library was perfect. As are two of the stories, the title piece and 'The Last of the Belles'. Scott's shorts get a bad press, usually considered the hackwork that stopped him writing more novels (I suppose in a sense I cleaved to that by wanting to save Tender), but that gift of his for evoking the perfect, fragile moment, and the sadness of the moment's passing - you don't need more than 20 pages for a hit of that. And if there's a certain set of elements which are likely to appear, a family resemblance between the stories - well, isn't that true of Saki, Borges, Chekhov, all the masters of the form?
• 
  Georgie

  So beautiful. So, so raw and vulnerable and captivating. The bittersweet conversations of an imagined past and a cherished love which couldn’t withstand his superiority.
  
  He searches for happiness through others’ relationships because he can’t fully open up in his own...
  
  ‘I was infatuated with you, Anson - you could make me do anything you liked. But we wouldn’t have been happy. I’m not smart enough for you. I don’t like things to be complicated like you do’ ... wow this was powerful. My favourite quotation from the short story... a mark of how love is sometimes not enough.
• 
  Rafa

  Insustancial. Creo que abandono a este escritor que me deslumbro en Gatsby.
• 
  Jackie

  This novella was based on someone Fitzgerald knew in school, Ludlow Fowler, though when this was first published the said friend asked for some passages removed. These passages have readded to this publication. Anson Hunter is our "rich boy" and has only been in love with one girl, Paula, but he chose not to marry her and she left him. He has numerous affairs, but no one can compare to Paula.
  This one was okay. Anson Hunter was an okay at first, but his arrogance and his expectations of women is irritating. He expects woman to on his level of intelligence and awareness, but to me this limiting. He's probably a realistic character, though. Once again, I liked Fitzgerald's writing style and I thought it interesting that he wrote about his friend. I appreciate his friend was cool with it as it doesn't make him look good, it's brutally honest, but I do wonder what passages he originally wanted removed.
• 
  Felipe Schuermann

  The Rich Boy has, most of the time, the very same voice as The Great Gatsby does - not only that; it instills in the reader the same feelings of the main character's airy solitude. Definitely one of the best short stories Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote!
• 
  Marinetta

  3,5*
  Ωραία γραφή .
  Δεν τρελάθηκα με την ιστορία.
• 
  Dimitris Patriarcheas

  Πολύ καλό διήγημα, συμπυκνωμένο και λιτό, περιγράφει τη στάση ζωής του ήρωα και παραθέτει κοινωνικό σχολιασμό για τις αστικές τάξεις της Νέας Υόρκης του μεσοπολέμου. Βεβαίως οποιοσδήποτε παραλληλισμός με τη δίκη μας σημερινή πραγματικότητα είναι ταιριαστός, κάτι που το κάνει να φαίνεται μοντέρνο και φρέσκο.
• 
  Elena Zisioglou

  F. Scott Fitzgerald seems to fully understand the psycology of his character, his actions , his behavior. It was my second book after the famous '' Great Gatsby'' and in my opinion, both books were great.
• 
  Tim Orfanos

  Και εδώ ο Φιτστζέραλντ καταπιάνεται με την αποπροσανατολιστική και υλιστική δεκαετίας του '20, αλλά με ένα τρόπο περισσότερο επαναστατικό και λιγότερο λυρικό από τον 'Μεγάλο Γκάτσμπυ'. Χαρακτηριστικά, ο συγγραφέας αναφέρει στην εισαγωγή ότι εμπνεύστηκε την ιστορία από τον κουμπάρο και συμφοιτητή του στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Πρίνστον, Λάντλοου Φάουλερ, ενώ θεωρεί ότι πρόκειται για ένα από τα καλύτερα κείμενα που έγραψε ποτέ.
  
  Θα συμφωνήσω προσθέτοντας ότι αποτελεί ένα αντιπροσωπευτικό λογοτεχνικό δείγμα του νέου μεγαλοαστού άντρα που ενηλικιώνεται, αμέσως μετά τον Α' παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, παλεύει να ξεφύγει απο μια συμβατική ζωή, προσπαθεί αποτυχημένα να αποφύγει το 'ξέφρενο' πνεύμα του Μεσοπολέμου, αλλά καταλήγει με μαθηματική ακρίβεια να αγκαλιάζει την μοναξιά, την ραθυμία, την αποστασιοποίηση και την έλλειψη δημιουργικότητας. Για τον βασικό ήρωα, Άνσον Χάντερ, κάθε στάδιο είναι και ένα μάθημα αυτογνωσίας από το οποίο είτε προσπαθεί να κερδίσει είτε να χάσει σημαντικά κομμάτια του εαυτού του, αφού, αρκετές φορές, αυτοσαμποτάρεται μην μπορώντας να 'αφεθεί' συναιασθηματικά.
  
  Η συγκεκριμένη νουβέλα περιλαμβάνεται στη συλλογή διηγημάτων ' 'Oλοι οι θλιμμένοι νέοι' (1926) και είναι πιο επίκαιρη από ποτέ.
  
  Βαθμολογία: 4,3/5 ή 8,6/10.
• 
  Chrysa Chouliara

  I read it long time ago. I remember enjoying it but not as much as the rest of his books. But it's the favorite book of my 94 year old grandmother and for that reason it will always have a special place in my heart.
• 
  Pete daPixie

  I pushed my rating up to three stars for this sampler. I have to say that fiction writing is not really my favourite reading material, hence the selection of this collection of three short stories.
  Having dipped my toes into F. Scott Fitzgerald, I find the waters a touch too cool. The rich boy as a business man in button downs, pressed into conference rooms, with battalions of paper-minded males, talking commodities and sales.
  Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created-nothing.
  Says it all really.
  
• 
  Paola F.

  El protagonista es Anson Hunter, un joven neoyorquino, nacido en la riqueza y cómo responde al amor, las relaciones con su familia y amigos, y los problemas de dinero y estatus dentro de su círculo íntimo de clase alta en los años 30.
  
  Es un libro corto, bien dinámico y que nos ambienta en esos años de principios del siglo XX.
  
  Una cita del libro que me llamó mucho la atención, y que da a pensar:
  Cuando escucho a un hombre proclamarse a sí mismo como un “tipo medio, honesto y abierto”, me siento bastante seguro de que tiene alguna anormalidad definida y quizás terrible que ha aceptado ocultar.
• 
  Angela Ramirez

  Hay un hombre bastante invisible que cuenta la vida de su amigo rico... Esa es la historia y esa es la forma en que se cuenta, un resumen de vida, algo plano casi hasta el fina;, de pronto el libro se ganó la tercera estrella por allá en la pagina 70. La vida contada de esta forma no pasa de ser una anécdota y es en los giros, en las ansiedades de los protagonistas y de la voz que narra que nace la literatura. El libro francamente no me gustó, simplón, le falta mucho a la voz narradora, es lejana a las angustias y circunstancias del protagonista.
• 
  Ann Tracy

  I wanted to only give this story 4 stars. It’s not one of those “absolutely love this story.” In fact there’s many things I don’t like about it. But FSF writing style alone, is always a solid 3-4 stars. But this story has me deep in thought about love, lost love, privilege, choices, self-destruction... The psychology seems so deep & I’ll be thinking of this story for a long time.
  
  Side note: The story brings up questions relevant today about privilege, wealth, power, patriarchy... I am taking a FSF class and there’s much to discuss in today’s terms.
• 
  Ravi Singh

  The usual telling of stories by Fitzgerald of rich people who live disenfranchised and even deluded lives where they just don't fit in. In a way its one of those stories where the characters have everything in terms of worldly possession, but they don't have 'themselves' or the object of their affections.
  
  The America of those times is wonderfully brought to life though. The are nice short stories to read.
• 
  Himali Kothari

  'There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story.'
  
  With this one line Fitzgerald establishes the importance of a single story, of steering away, far away from generalizations.
  
  Like in The Great Gatsby, the author uses a secondary character to show the protagonist's story. And while his physical role in the story is far more limited than in Gatsby, it is evident that he will arrive to his resolution as the protagonist too heads towards his own.
• 
  William

  I thought I'd lost this book in the middle of reading it(thought it fell out of my bag while riding my scooter), but then weeks after giving up on it resurfacing I found it sandwiched between my night stand and the bed. Quickly finished it before I had the chance to lose it again and thoroughly enjoyed it.