The poetry in this book is sooooo bad. Fitzgerald himself notes that Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Dark Lady wouldn’t have lasted if they were overly contrived, so I guess he didn’t want his sonnets to survive. All of the characters in this book are really terribly written and the dialogue is god-awful. Everytime Amory meets another woman, you have to get ready for a character that feels like the author has never actually seen a woman. It’s an experimental book, which means that there’s random dialogue in the form of a play, a random Q and A session, and what feels like an unending slog of Amory complaining about his life and lambasting poor people before reciting terrible poetry and philosophizing from a soapbox. This box really felt like getting yelled at from a corner preacher. Only, in that case, I would actually have been able to run away. Never again.