The B-Side of Paradise: A Review

The B-Side of Paradise: A Review

Westchester resident and publisher of What To Do: Armonk, Bedford & Chappaqua, Alfred D’Alessandro’s The B-Side Of Paradise is a laugh-out loud Classic Rock era response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dawn of the Jazz Age novel This Side of Paradise, both set on the Princeton University campus. Based on real events, this coming-of-age romp depicts a “spirited first-gen crashing and burning the Ivy League like Holden Caulfield reborn.” And in so doing, delivers a heathen creed that is sure to make the Ivy League blush.

The B-Side of Paradise follows the quixotic journey of a high school cut up whose stand-out academic and athletic careers attracts the attention of Princeton admissions who assure our middle-class hero that he will be a “good fit” at that elite bastion of higher education Tiger alums are fond of calling Old Nassau. Where our miscast champion soon discovers that his side of Fitzgerald’s “paradise” is more like The B-Side—of a hit single in the record industry.

Throughout this episodic work, D’Alessandro takes us on an upended hero’s journey that he divides into four sections: The Beginning; The Descent; The Rise; The Crash and Burn. After a first year from hell his prospects take a dramatic turn as he garners “Three Major University Sanctioned Awards”—a tongue in cheek homage to the “leg lamp with the fishnet stockings” that the father in Gene Shepard’s A Christmas Story refers to as a “major award.”

The B-Side: Think “This Boy” compared to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”

The “B-Side” (that the Cambridge Dictionary calls “the less important side” of a 45 rpm record promoted by a record label and the Urban Dictionary calls “filler”) serves as the defining metaphor of his college experience and is woven throughout the book the way mischief and mayhem follow him around campus.

In The Case of the Purloined Grocery Cart, all he needed to turn an ordinary Ivy League evening into a night of international intrigue was a road tripping friend from high school, a fifth of Southern Comfort, a prank caller, an ordinary grocery cart––and a classmate with protected status from American intelligence. And The Abbreviated Wrestling Match might have been a harmless exercise in appeasement if someone had just thought to MOVE THE COFFEE TABLE.

In time, our irreverent upstart learns that he can charm himself into more places he doesn’t belong than anybody. Indeed, throughout the book we find him in the arms of a Persian Princess, inside the tenth circle of Dante’s hell otherwise known as The Love Suite of Spelman Hall, and on the receiving end of an invitation to what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “breathlessly aristocratic” Ivy Club. Where he becomes an improbable member of Princeton’s oldest eating club and most prestigious campus society—home to Wanamaker’s, Fords and Rockefellers before him.

An Accidental D.E.I. Pioneer

Wherever he goes he forges unique relationships with a colorful collection of characters from every demographic and identity group that walked the campus at the time: the scion of a famed European industrialist, a son of the Onondaga nation; a gay Kentucky blue blood; a brother from Miami’s Coconut Grove, a 12-year-old math prodigy; and the ladies’ swim team captain, Triangle Club musical comedy lead and award winning American Literature student who he takes to dinner at Ivy—in a night that disrupted Ivy’s social order of Arrow collars and Coolidge dollars forever.

Throughout D’Alessandro’s mythic journey up and down Princeton’s social ladder he offers valuable lessons on success and friendship they don’t teach in Princeton’s McCosh lecture halls. Offering deliciously unreliable narrator bits along the way in a mash up of Ivy League pretexts and pretensions.

Nothing (and no one) escapes his satirical B-Side microscope including Princeton Admissions, Princeton Football, the university’s famous senior thesis requirement, Professor John Nash the Nobel Laureate and subject of Ron Howard’s Academy Award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind, Woodrow Wilson, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeff Bezos (the guy who ruined everything.) Who are all subject to his acerbic wit.

A Nostalgia Trip for Baby Boomers and a College Handbook for Cool Kids

The B-Side of Paradise is more than a nostalgia trip for Baby Boomers; it’s a College Handbook for Cool Kids that dishes dirt on the Ivies you won’t hear anywhere else. In a style that is part Hunter S. Thompson/part Dave Barry, The B-Side is the Truth or Dare of college lit, that offers some alt-Ivy wisdom high school seniors can use in college and the rest of us can enjoy in our emeritus years.

The B-Side of Paradise

By Alfred D’Alessandro

From What To Do Media

Available in print and digital editions on Amazon and Barnes & Nobel.