In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence”, poet and critic John T. Irwin acknowledges his personal identification with Fitzgerald's lyricism. Indeed, this is the book's initial premise: tracing the often poetic resonance of the novelist's fiction in the life and work of the scholar. Emotion here is allied to analysis; Irwin uncovers the inward sway of Fitzgerald's language – a sincere love for its musicality lies at the core of his own literary endeavour.

Irwin confesses to being what many literary scholars pretend not to be in relation to their subjects: “a fan of Fitzgerald's fiction” (1). In the book's preface, he unabashedly describes Fitzgerald as “my favourite twentieth-century American fiction writer” (ix). Tender Is the Night is “the greatest American novel of the twentieth century” (x). For its part, Irwin's study is “a labor of love,” the consummation of a romance beginning in his freshman year of college (x). His record of his first encounter with The Great Gatsby is infused with nostalgia for his own self-actualization. Invoking Gatsby as an American literary rite of passage, Irwin gestures at the potent mixture of yearning and tragedy that accounts for Fitzgerald's enduring popularity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction is strengthened by the eclecticism of the veteran critic, contextualizing its analyses with adept discussions of jazz and movie history, of theatricality in Henry James and Edith Wharton's novels of manners, and of Freud and Sartre, as well as of Fitzgerald and Irwin's biographical confluences. The first three chapters examine Irwin's admiration of Fitzgerald's work, their (partly) southern lineages, and their mutual appreciation for jazz and the popular songs of the first decades of the twentieth century. (Indeed, Irwin argues convincingly that a well-known Cole Porter lyric was inspired by a passage in Tender Is the Night (34–38).) After demonstrating his affinity with Fitzgerald, Irwin presents nuanced readings of what he regards as the novelist's mature works: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and the fragment The Love of the Last Tycoon. His interest in early novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned is slight. Irwin identifies a structural pattern, established in Gatsby and revisited in Fitzgerald's subsequent works, comprising themes of social performance and the conflict between personal and professional selves, and an Eliotic predilection for mythical parallels. The book's fifth and sixth chapters are concerned largely with Irwin's prior work on Poe, Borges, and Hart Crane; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction is the third entry in a trilogy anchored by discussion of “each writer's engagement with Platonic idealism” as it relates to expressions of art and desire (194).

Irwin is most successful in his treatment of the projections of desire and performance in Fitzgerald's two major novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. In examining Jay Gatsby's “imaginative re-creation of himself” – what narrator Nick Carraway refers to as Gatsby's “Platonic conception of himself” – Irwin identifies Fitzgerald's fruitful preoccupation with “deific autogenesis” or “incarnation” (77, 79). Gatsby's self-invention is paralleled, of course, by his idealized and, finally, thwarted projection of Daisy Buchanan as a figure of desire: she is Galatea to his Pygmalion. “For Fitzgerald,” Irwin claims, “disillusion comes from facing the discrepancy between an illusory (one might say, dream) image and a real person, between a picture and a physical body” (146). Perhaps for this reason an increasingly weary Dick Diver, in Tender, asserts that “it was often easier to give a show than to watch one.” Irwin links this inevitably broken faith to the psychic purchase of the visual plane, perceived in many ways falsely as the manifestation of inward desire. In Tender Is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald extended his examination of idealized – and gendered – projection to encompass two Hollywood actresses (Rosemary Hoyt and Minna Davis) and their male beholders (Dick Diver and Monroe Stahr).

Unlike much Fitzgerald criticism, Irwin's book is not overwhelmed by biographical readings of his fiction. While he does touch on Fitzgerald's own social posturing, anxiety, and drinking; wife Zelda's literary ambitions and declining health; daughter Scottie's education; and the family's attendant money troubles, Irwin allows for extensive and wide-ranging textual analysis, also encompassing Fitzgerald's lesser- and better-known short stories. In the 1922 story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), Fitzgerald wrote, “flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream” that would occupy the remainder of his fiction.

As the fruit of his own Platonic idealism, Fitzgerald's literary output mirrors Jay Gatsby's wishful fancies. In much the same way, Irwin's book pays tribute to Fitzgerald as the author of Irwin's own youthfully encountered ideal, though revisited in maturity. The book's willingness “to look at itself looking” at Fitzgerald in this way (3) – a quality Irwin attributes to Carraway relative to Gatsby – is its greatest achievement.