- West of Sunset is about the last days of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Stewart O’Nan’s greatest gift as a writer is his ability to work in miniature. His greatest novel, Last Night at the Lobster, is nothing more than the story of the final day of a failed Red Lobster restaurant. With absolutely no gimmicks or sentimentality, O’Nan gave the staff and operations of a backwater chain restaurant outpost the same care and attention that, say, Jonathan Franzen bestows upon terrible suburban American families, and the results are riveting. His novel The Odds, about a married couple trying to give their dying marriage one more shot by taking a Valentine’s Day trip to Niagara Falls, is similarly small in scope, a quiet story about an ordinary couple…