Fiction masquerading as history can provide a fascinating take on an old story, especially when it focuses on the subject matter of already well-known literature. Caroline Preston takes on such a task in “Gatsby’s Girl,” the story of Ginevra Perry, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s muse for such beguiling characters as Daisy Buchanan.
Ginevra King, the fictionalized version of Fitzgerald’s true “first love” Ginevra Perry, serves as the heroine in this telling of Scott and Ginevra’s romance, and tells the story “without the moonlight” of Fitzgerald’s famed romantic style.
Preston’s story opens 10 years after Scott’s death, with a phone call from his daughter Scottie to Ginevra, still living in the home Scott visited decades earlier. Scottie’s request to meet for lunch prompts Ginevra to tell the true story of her short-lived romance with Scott and how her life unfolded after they parted so many years ago.
Preston’s elaborately imaginative take on what might have been takes the reader far beyond the glimpses of Ginevra that can be gleaned from Daisy in “The Great Gatsby” and provides illumination on the elusive influence for Fitzgerald’s classic works.
When Ginevra and Scott met for the first time, she, a flighty 16-year-old socialite, and he, three years her senior, neither could have guessed that they were in the peak of their lives and would each be followed (and haunted) by one another’s influence for interminable years to come.
The biggest difference, and arguably the novel’s greatest advantage or disadvantage, between Preston’s novel and Fitzgerald’s work, is the disparity between the narrators’ style and tone. Where Fitzgerald waxes sentimental and flowery in his descriptions and prose, Ginevra’s voice tends toward realism and a refusal to romanticize.
While this is certainly a divergence from Fitzgerald’s beloved brand of storytelling, it is also what allows “Gatsby’s Girl” to stand on its own.
Though Ginevra is a spirited, vivacious girl akin to Fitzgerald’s heroines, Preston makes no effort to hide her often superficial, selfish nature as a young girl in stark contrast to Scott’s earnest professions of undying love. In short, she makes it easy to see how Fitzgerald himself later described their break-up by saying she “threw (him) over with supreme boredom and indifference.”
After Ginevra ends her largely letter-based romance with Scott, she dives head first into a marriage with the handsome though dull aviator Billy Granger. Her father’s warning not to marry Billy “because (she needs) a husband who has some pep and imagination” takes on an unfortunate irony when it becomes clear that this description actually applies to Scott. However, Ginevra takes no heed, and doesn’t realize until far too late that she will never find fulfillment from the husband and children she’s chosen.
Though Ginevra and Scott have only one more brief instance of direct contact in the novel, it becomes clear he isn’t faring much better, having slipped into alcoholism and an unshakable broodiness.
Meanwhile, Ginevra’s greatest pleasure is finding glimpses of herself in his work. She devours his stories and novels with a gaping hunger to see herself in his heroines, and she is seldom disappointed. It is through his writing that she attempts to recapture the feeling of youth and invincibility that she has lost completely in her real life.
“Gatsby’s Girl” covers the life of the muse for some of America’s best-loved heroines and their creator with an aplomb that makes no apologies for its portrayals of these people as characters. Though Preston’s prose lacks Fitzgerald’s luster and glitter, it is just this unmistakable contrast that makes the novel an innovation that is both inextricably intertwined in and around Fitzgerald’s work and a completely freestanding work of its own.
In the end, “Gatsby’s Girl” is a thoroughly absorbing look at the life and times of two mysterious historical figures written with creativity and self-sufficient assurance that makes even unlikely events fascinating possibilities.