Beautiful Little Fools
Beautiful Little Fools is Jillian Cantor’s spin-off of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald’s novel focuses on the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby, who throws great parties for his wealthy neighbors in West Egg, Long Island, and Gatsby’s obsession with a married woman named Daisy Buchanan. Writing from the point of view of Nick Carraway, Daisy’s Princeton-educated second cousin and Gatsby’s best friend, Fitzgerald weaves a brittle and delicate web of upper-class romantic intrigue that slowly unwraps Gatsby’s elusive, shady, sentimental, and somewhat naive character. It’s a love story wrapped in a mystery.
Beautiful Little Fools is a different take on the same story. It focuses more on Fitzgerald’s women—Daisy Buchanan, her friend Jordan Baker, Myrtle Wilson, the mistress of Daisy’s husband, and Myrtle’s sister Catherine.
Cantor’s novel is in part a police procedural. Detective Frank Charles, a newly invented character, wades in to investigate the murder of Gatsby, the event which ends Fitzgerald’s book. Beautiful Little Fools concocts a new mystery and sets up a dramatic (and different) conclusion involving the women.
Nick Carraway comes off as terribly boring, but Fitzgerald’s other characters feel true to their roots. The author fashions believable back stories and tells her story effectively and with frequent shifts of point of view. She re-creates Fitzgerald’s leisure class milieu, and aside from a couple of phrases that sound contemporary, the dialogue rings true. While this is not Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, the book is beautifully packaged and the story clearly written. The novel has more sex than the original, if less romance, and it’s an interesting sort of try. Once again, rich people get away with murder and life goes on.
Beautiful Little Fools should interest many readers looking for another helping of The Great Gatsby.
