“He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.”

Young proto-Fitzgerald is a narcissistic brat. We feel (with painful accuracy) the emptiness and vapidness of youthful love and schooling. Fitzgerald uses a very stitched together narrative that basically works. Some beautiful sentences too (far fewer than his greater novels), but a mostly insubstantial and unbalanced work.