Fitzgerald, at the Edge of a Sentence

The ending of “Babylon Revisited” is one of the great quiet endings in American fiction. Fitzgerald, who rewrote the final paragraph more than once, refuses the consolations a lesser writer would have reached for. There is no flourish, no rounding image. The widowed Charlie Wales is left alone in a Paris bar at Christmas, and the prose declines to comfort him.

What does the grief’s work is the moral instrument of the sentence itself — short clauses, plain nouns, the slow turning of the comma. We come back to Fitzgerald not for the parties. We come back for the restraint at the end of the room.

— The Editors