Save Me The Waltz - Reception

Reception

Critics were mostly negative about the book, considering the book overwritten, the characters weak and uninteresting, and scenes which should have been tragedy instead a "harlequinade". The New York Times wrote: "It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader." Zelda was mostly depressed about the negative reviews, though she acknowledged to Perkins that a review from William McFee, writing in The New York Sun, was at least intelligible.

McFee wrote, "In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction." Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read the book and wrote to Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before."

The book sold only 1,392 copies for which she earned $120.73. (The book would be reprinted years after her and Scott's deaths, when interest in the Fitzgeralds was rekindled.) The failure of Save Me the Waltz crushed her spirits.

She had been working throughout the fall of 1932 on a second novel, based on her experiences in psychiatric treatment. But Scott's reaction was unkind. In a fight before Zelda was readmitted to treatment, Fitzgerald said her novel was "plagiaristic, unwise in every way... should not have been written." Zelda asked, "didn't you want me to be a writer?" Though Scott once had, he lashed out "No, I do not care whether you were a writer or not, if you were any good... you are a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet." The psychiatrist agreed with Scott. Zelda was devastated; she never published another novel.