Book: The seven basic plots
Author: Christopher Booker
Price: (Continuum, £25)
It may seem odd to propose F Scott Fitzgerald as the most modern of storytellers, but consider how his portrait of Anson Hunter, the protagonist of The Rich Boy, opens with the narrator’s reflections on his own technique: “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.” The Rich Boy was written in 1925, as Fitzgerald waited for The Great Gatsby to be published. With the explosion of modernism, the 1920s were a watershed for storytelling. Behind this decade were Austen, Dickens and James; in front, Joyce and Borges. Yet far from showing Fitzgerald marooned on the 19th-century shore (where critics almost invariably place him), the 30 pages of The Rich Boy demonstrate a remarkable bridging of that watershed. The story consists of a linear narrative managed by a modern consciousness. It may owe more to Chekhov than Beckett, but post-Beckett it is possible to see a notion of reality that has already abandoned authority, becoming oblique, partial, esoteric. “The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter,” the narrator concludes his introduction, “is to approach him as a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost.”
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