Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: A promising start, but not much substance to this novel

I was disappointed there was not more substance to this novel. Fitzgerald was less than halfway finished when he died, and the seventeen "completed" episodes were in obvious need of re-editing. Judging from the author's notes, they would have been revised extensively anyway to fit his shifting vision of how the plot would evolve. There are moments of clever satire on the Hollywood Industry (and especially its writers) that would probably have made the finished product well worth reading, but Fitzgerald was still struggling to balance the satirical tone of his novel with the love story of its protagonists. The editor's notes were very helpful, though, inasmuch as they showed what direction Fitzgerald wanted to take and the alternate endings he had in mind.