This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published 1920 · 83,041 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction
How hard is This Side of Paradise to read?
This Side of Paradise scores 27 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Literary, Latinate vocabulary. Princeton slang. Period-specific cultural references.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Amory philosophizes constantly about beauty, selfhood, and purpose. The novel is a young intellectual's self-portrait.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Dense with cultural references and literary allusions, but episodic structure keeps any single chapter manageable.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Chronological but mode-shifting. The formal experiments create indirection even within a linear story.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- Princeton as paradise. The war as fall. Women as mirrors for Amory's self-conception.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Fitzgerald both identifies with and gently mocks Amory's pretensions. The irony is affectionate.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The novel ends with Amory's declaration of self-knowledge, but the resolution is emotional, not narrative.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Mixed modes—prose, drama, poetry, letters—create a formally restless structure.
How This Side of Paradise is regarded
This Side of Paradise holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.