Careless People (Churchwell) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Churchwell brings… a lively curiosity, a gift for making connections, and an infectious passion for Fitzgerald and his greatest novel…. A suggestive, almost musical evocation of the spirit of the time.
London Review of Books


The first readers of The Great Gatsby thought it was all about themselves, a book of the moment. Today, we tend to admire its enduring mythology of aspiration and undoing. Churchwell brilliantly brings these two perspectives together as she holds in counterpoint the sprawling stuff of Fitzgerald’s daily life and the gleamingly taut prose poem that emerged from it… Fitzgerald offered the year 1922 as the chief exhibit when he tried to explain the meaning of the jazz age. It is an exhibit worth looking at very carefully. Careless People does so with a mixture of patience and panache and it would take a long time to get bored of that particular cocktail.
New Statesman (UK)


The wonder of Careless People ... is that it rewinds the years and allows the reader to appreciate again just how well Fitzgerald reflected his times.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)


A literary spree, bursting with recherché detail, high spirits and the desperate frisson of the jazz age.
Observer (UK)


A treasury of new material. Churchwell adds considerably to our understanding of the early 1920s, and how life for Fitzgerald played into the development of his art.
Literary Review (UK)


Churchwell evokes the Jazz Age in all its ephemeral glamour and recklessness in her latest book.... "a collage" of Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' world and a social history of the times.... Churchwell strains to establish a close connection between the [New Jersey] Mills-Hall murders and Fitzgerald’s work on [Gatsby].
Publishers Weekly


Churchwell [The Great Gatsy] genesis to the Hall-Mills murder case, a notorious 1920s double homicide that occurred in New Jersey. Since the novel is set in 1922, also the year Fitzgerald began plotting the story, Churchwell examines the events...that took place in that important year.... [W]ell-written and entertaining. —Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn
Library Journal


Churchwell... has written an excellent book.... [S]he even manages to find fresh facts that escaped previous scholars, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's own published comments about [The Great Gatsby], a book that, as Churchwell notes, neither sold well nor received uniformly favorable reviews.... Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.
Kirkus Reviews