For Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone starts with Gatsby and many people stop there, but Fitzgerald poured more of himself into Tender Is the Night. The collapse of Dick Diver, a charming American psychiatrist gradually consumed by his wealthy wife's world, is harder to watch precisely because it is slower and more ordinary. No green light, no romantic myth: just a brilliant person erasing himself in installments. The 1985 BBC miniseries adaptation with Peter Strauss and Mary Steenburgen is underseen and worth tracking down.

Woody Allen's film is not a deep movie, but it nails exactly the temptation Fitzgerald diagnosed: the belief that some other era was more alive than the present one. Gil Pender wants to live in the 1920s Paris of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. The film gently punctures this, showing that the people of that golden era were themselves pining for an earlier golden era. Fitzgerald would have recognized the joke immediately. He wrote it first.

Disco Elysium is about a man who has tried to drink himself out of existence and now has to reconstruct who he was from the wreckage. That is not so different from what Fitzgerald was doing in the late 1930s, writing the Pat Hobby stories while Hollywood chewed him up. Both works are studies in a particular kind of brilliant, self-destructive charm. The writing in Disco Elysium is among the best prose in any game ever made, and it earns that comparison.

Fitzgerald acknowledged Wharton's influence, and the debt is obvious once you see it. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence are about the same violence: a society that destroys people who do not fit its rules while pretending to be civilized. Wharton is colder and more precise, Fitzgerald warmer and more self-implicating, but both are writing about the cost of wanting to belong to a world that was never built for you. Reading them together is one of the better two-author surveys in American literature.