I didn’t like The Pat Hobby Stories. Fitzgerald writes very well, of course, but I found them unpleasantly bitter, profoundly depressing and in the end a little vacuous.
Pat Hobby is an almost-forgotten hack writer, scratching a living in Hollywood where he was once a celebrated writer. Written at a time when Fitzgerald himself was working in Hollywood, they represent a satirised picture of his life there. The problem for me is that, rather than satire, each story is a slightly farcical tale of Hobby pulling various fast ones to try to get work and improve his status, in which he fails humiliatingly. To me, thestories just weren’t funny, they had no real bite as satire and really didn’t add up to much at all. I just found them a rather insipid and depressing portrait of a place and an industry awash with ego and self-interest – but we already know all that about Hollywood. Added to Hobby’s own unpleasantness, manipulativeness and litany of failure and humiliation, it produced a series of stories which I tired of very quickly. I read about half of them, which was as much as I could take, and then gave up, I’m afraid.
F.Scott Fitzgerald may have produced some of the great literature of the 20th century, but The Pat Hobby Stories most certainly don’t qualify as that; they are more a rather sad footnote to the life of a fine writer.
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