sholio | The Great Gatsby

I haven't read the book since eighth grade, and don't remember much of what I thought about it. I should reread it as an adult.

This is only tangentially related to your post, but I have that feeling all the time when I'm reading old stuff about how modern it feels. I get that way about The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh being afraid of his own mortality or The Aeneid and how cinematically parts of it are written.

There's a great moment like that right at the start of Anthony & Cleopatra where she's basically like "But how MUCH do you love me?" and he's all, "Baby, if I could set limits on my love like that, it wouldn't really be true love now would it?" It still makes me smile when I reread it.

That is sweet!

I know what you mean about the "more modern than expected" feeling to a lot of older literature/writing. I think it gets harder to parse it out the farther back you go because so much of it depends on the translation and on being able to see the person underneath through the intermediate structuring of form and style, but yeah - people are people right back to the beginning.

Nods nods. Exactly.

I know it's popular to hate on TGG, but I think it's a great book, evocative and emotional in the right places, critical of the idea of entitlement and the American Dream we've been sold as a country, and the description of Gatsby's anticipation and first kiss with Daisy is some superlative writing.

It's one of my FAVE books ever. Jordan and Daisy are disappointing as characters but it's some of the best writing in Amlit.

They are, but I still think it's a great read with some excellent writing.

Oh yes, it's one of my absolute favourite books ever.

I was actually quite pleasantly surprised that the comments weren't full of condemnation for the book, tbh! I know it's different to come to it as an adult reading it for pleasure rather than a high schooler being forced to read it and report on it, but I loved it far more than I expected to - it's not a comfortable book, but it's not supposed to be. And the writing is really excellent.

I think so much depends on the teachers? I had some great English teachers in high school, so I didn't hate nearly as many things as other people did (I didn't have to read some of the real groaners, either, despite always being in honors or AP English), because the teachers were so enthusiastic and engaged in the work.

I went on a Fitzgerald binge in high school, and was enamored of his writing, so image-rich. But finally there was too much alcohol-soaked maze gaze for me to keep his stuff from move to move, though he, unlike Hemingway and most of the rest of their crowd (and I include Gertrude Stein) seemed to have sympathy for women as people. Observant and insightful within that limitation, at least so it seems looking down the years (haven't reread him for decades), leaving me wishing he'd been able to ditch the juice. What might he have accomplished?

Tender is the Night is WAY better with female characters, although still not that great by post-feminism standards. But he was certainly more sympathetic to women than Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, &c &c -- most of his other contemporaries.

Yup. Agreed.

His writing is absolutely lovely; and yeah, I didn't go in with high expectations for the female characters in this book, but actually found them better characterized and, as you say, written with more sympathy/empathy than I was expecting.

Daisy gets that great line about "You want too much" -- which is accurate, she's right about how the whole doomed grand endeavour to turn back the past and wipe out her marriage and love for Tom is just not something that can actually happen. We're supposed to sympathize with Gatsby and his striving for the green light &c &c., but to me that's such a mature sad reading of the situation. (Even if Tom is a total wanker.)

I, like many, many people, had to read this in highschool. Back when I was internet dating, Match had a field for "favorite book" and, I shit you not, at least half the guys whose profile I looked at said Great Gatsby. And I was always like...is this because it's a short, accessible book in the literary canon that you were forced to read in school and you haven't read anything since? Or is this cause you think it's romantic? Cause if the latter, *runs*

//EYEROLL

The old classics for that kind of posing used to be:

Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451
The Old Man and the Sea

And for the more lit'ry types:

The Red Badge of Courage
Heart of Darkness
The Scarlet Letter

Hahahaha. Well, at least it's not Atlas Shrugged.

//CRIES

I think the "Short Classics" version of that is Anthem.

Ooh, I always really love getting people's fresh impressions of classics. I really do think this book has lasted well: there's an energy to it, and a certain combination of empathy and judgment in Nick's perspective, that add interesting angles to the overall tragedy, and I like that it doesn't necessarily develop in the direction you'd expect. And the overall thrust of "rich people will always retreat into their money" is sadly timeless.

Yeah, Nick's shifting judgements of Gatsby in the story -- his disapproval at the time, and how he feels about it "now," and how those get kind of passed on to the reader because of the first-person narration -- are amazing. That "'You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together'" moment is still really something, like Huck's declaring "All right then, I'll go to hell" for Jim.

(And on another level, because Fitzgerald is basing both Gatsby and Nick on himself, it's him judging himself and his work, too.)

That "'You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together'" moment is still really something

That was such a good scene, all the more because we also got all of his ambivalence and condemnation towards Gatsby. I think one of several reasons why the book read so college-age to me even though the characters are all (or mostly) technically older than that was because the way he relates to Gatsby has that vivid suddenness and love-hate intensity that friendships in college often do.

NICK AND JAY COLLEGE FRESHMAN AU

IS IT ON AO3 AND IF NOT WHY NOT

there's an energy to it, and a certain combination of empathy and judgment in Nick's perspective, that add interesting angles to the overall tragedy

Yes! I found that I really couldn't put it down once I'd started reading, and part of that is watching Nick's view on Gatsby evolve in this interestingly layered way, where his current impressions of Gatsby are shading the way he remembers him when they first met. There's a lot there, that I wasn't expecting. Plus the vividness of place and prose are really excellent.

The whole shifting back and forth in time, from Nick then to Nick now as he's telling us the story and how that shapes what he sees then, including all the versions of Gatsby's history, is so good, and I think something that's really hard to pull off well. In a way the book is also about the deep pull, and danger of, nostalgia, like how Gatsby wants to rewrite his poverty and failure and basically go back in time to carry off Daisy (which Fitzgerald felt like he did manage to do in his own life. But he wrote the novel when his marriage was failing -- specifically right when Zelda was having an affair).

That said, I recognize that due to its literary reputation this is a book most people (Americans, anyway) probably already have deeply entrenched opinions about.

You still get to have opinions!

I did not read this book for class in high school, but almost everyone else I knew was reading it for class in high school, so I read it while in high school and I remember enjoying it, although it is entirely possible that what I enjoyed at the time was the prose. Every now and then I think about re-reading it, and your review suggests that I just should.

A lot of the established Opinions were weird/wrong, too (it was largely seen as a flashy shallow novel until well into the Fitzgerald Resurrection, which was the result of academia in the late 40s? early 50s?). Altho someone out there now is probably busily writing a thesis on how Tom and Daisy are the Kardashians, which isn't right either.

I think you might really like it; it has a very strong sense of time and place, a unique voice, and a layered-yet-transparent quality to the narration (in the sense that what it's saying is clear, but there's still a lot there), all of which I think you would enjoy.

I love this book, SO MUCH. (It's so flawed too, omg. A lot of Fitzgerald's resentment at Zelda is on display in it re his characterization of Daisy. But it's still lovely.) Unlike everyone else I did not read it in high school, because I did not go to high school LOL -- it was one of my dad's favourite novels and he passed it along to me when I was at most 12 or so. (I was like that Salinger character who says "The Great Gatsby was my Huck Finn.") I think what gives it that really fresh modern quality is his writing style -- it's so vivid and almost cliche-free, it's like he paints the most incredible pictures for you. The pacing and cutting in various scenes, the intricate relation of set pieces, and stuff like the "All these people came to Gatsby's house that summer" catalogue (which I used to have memorized as a bookish adolescent) are just fucking sublime. (Meyer Wolfshiem: the opposite of fucking sublime. Gahh. Reading 1920s lit sometimes really sucks because, just as you say, it feels so modern for various reasons that when the very casual racism of the period merrily pops up, it really whams the reader in the face. IMHO Amlit doesn't start even gradually shedding that until maybe the postwar period, but that's a giant topic.)

I think absolutely you're right it has a kind of college era feel about it -- Fitzgerald wrote it when he was 27 or 28 (BRAT) and Nick is the same age (hilariously, Fitzgerald regards thirty as the BEGINNING of middle age until he himself is past thirty-five) and I think all the main characters are in their middle or early 20s. It's set post-college, post-war, in the thick of the Boom, and among probably the 10 or 5 if not the 1%. You're also right it's pretty unusual for Daisy (and Jordan) to survive -- she's a shallow adultress! Myrtle, Gatsby and Wilson are all basically sacrificed to and for the rich, Daisy and Tom. (I love that moment when Tom insists on being shaken hands with and Nick just kind of disgustedly gives up, it would be like refusing to shake hands with a child.) "The rich" can't be touched, but in a way that's a terrible fate for them, too -- they'll never learn, change, they'll never have moral growth. In a lot of ways GG's about immaturity, and disillusionment -- there's that terrible (beautifully written) passage about "(Gatsby) must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is...." Fitzgerald is writing about the extravagance and decay of a generation, a whole social class, and America as a country, but also about his own loss of illusions about first love, success, "winning the girl," and his own marriage. It is one of the first great modern requiems for the American Dream (while pretty clear-eyed, for its time, about how hollow that Dream actually is). "But that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning -- " To me that's just absolutely devastating. Fitzgerald is perhaps one of the finest American writers on the emotional effects of loss and time -- maturity and disappointment.

and b) Gatsby wasn't Daisy's babydaddy. Or was he? I mean, obviously, there's a hundred years of literary criticism of this book that I've completely missed out on.

LOLLL I can fill you in on a bunch of it if you really want (you don't want, trust me). Like a lot of Fitzgerald's work, once you start looking at the internal chronology and geography, there's almost no consistent continuity and a shitload of errors. This happened largely because he didn't have that great an education despite prep school and Princeton (he basically flunked out) and actually wasn't terribly well read (not for that time -- he probably would be considered so NOW). Of his contemporaries Hemingway read far more widely and deeply, and Wolfe was the most highly educated of Perkins's famous stable, even with all the "wild mountain man" mystique crap. But Fitzgerald worked seriously at writing from a very young age on and as a result his mature style is almost flawless. But from the very start of his career, his books contained enormous howlers (FPA, the famous literary columnist of NYC in the day, invited people to contribute lists of the errors they found in This Side of Paradise) which Perkins didn't correct, because he wasn't a proofreader, and reprints of the books didn't include corrections Fitzgerald did make.

TL;DR birthdays are moveable feasts, peoples' ages bounce up and down, minor character names are not consistent....Gatsby's medal could not have been engraved, and as Hemingway famously joked, "There are no salmon in Lake Superior" (and as Ring Lardner pointed out, no tides either -- Fitzgerald did change that one to "wind"). This actually can work to his advantage in books like Gatsby and Tender is the Night, which have an atmosphere of hazy glamour built on pretenses and lies -- is Gatsby's medal real? In the text the actual medal is still ambiguous (my edition of GG says Fitzgerald probably was thinking of the "Grand Officier de Danilo," "won by three Princetonians," but like most errors in his books, he came close, and nobody ever corrected the mistake). Did he really win it? Did he go to Princeton? Yes and no. And it doesn't matter in the end -- he's an artist creating himself, his own story. -- And truly a lot of it is just nitpicking. (Did I give a fuck when I first read the book when I was 12 or so about salmon in Lake Superior? No.) But the constant mistakes also harm the storylines, like the length of Gatsby's devotion and Daisy's faithlessness, and Dick's deterioration in Tender in the Night -- how Fitzgerald wants to show characterization with the passage of time.

Daisy and Tom were married in June 1919, and the next April (1920) Daisy had her daughter. So if her child is three in June 1922, she would have been born in early 1919, oops. Clearly at that particular time in society Daisy could not have been hugely pregnant or post-childbirth before she got married. So Pammy is two, not three, although her reported converation suggests an even older child, which also throws readers off. This also tracks with Fitzgerald's own life, which is the basis for Nick and Gatsby: he and Zelda were married April 3, 1920 and their only daughter was born October 26, 1921. And he put Zelda's words at her daughter's birth straight into his book as he did a lot of her behaviour and sayings -- "Isn't she smart -- she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool -- a beautiful little fool."

-- This complete tl;dr brought to you by my USELESS obsession with American Modernist lit, I have something like ten separate biographies of Fitzgerald! AMA

It's kind of a relief that the inconsistent timelines wasn't just down to me misremembering/misreading! I wasn't actually paying that much attention to that aspect of the book for the most part, but the one I particularly noticed was Gatsby's dad and the book with the notes in it, which supposedly were written by Gatsby in 1906, which would have made him ... six? Eight?

But as you say, it almost works with this particular book's central premise, and in fact perhaps adds an extra layer to it - not all of it, but since the entire book is about Gatsby's life being a Jenga tower of lies, the fact that things don't all come together is thematically appropriate and in fact I occasionally wondered, as I was reading, if Nick was leaving things out, lying, or misrepresenting events to cast Gatsby and/or himself in a better light. By the end of the book I didn't think so, I mean not to the extent that it's the sort of book where you finish up with the realization that the narrator left out something huge that the reader was supposed to have picked up on. But it does add to the book's air of glazed unreliability.

You're also right it's pretty unusual for Daisy (and Jordan) to survive -- she's a shallow adultress! Myrtle, Gatsby and Wilson are all basically sacrificed to and for the rich, Daisy and Tom. (I love that moment when Tom insists on being shaken hands with and Nick just kind of disgustedly gives up, it would be like refusing to shake hands with a child.) "The rich" can't be touched, but in a way that's a terrible fate for them, too -- they'll never learn, change, they'll never have moral growth.

Yeah; I really liked how, in particular, it's apparent at the end of the book that Daisy ended just as she began, unwilling or unable to learn from any of the things that happened to her during the book. It's obvious from the start that Tom is that shallow, but you tend to want to see Daisy through Gatsby's adoration of her.

It does make me think that Gatsby dying at the point when he does, and in the way that he does, is perhaps the least interesting thing that could actually have happened to him at that point, when he's just come face to face with evidence that Daisy really is that blithe and shallow; she ran over a woman in the street and left her to die! I mean, on the one hand, it's obviously what the book was building up towards, but it also takes any choice about what to do from there on out (with Daisy, with the rest of his life) out of his hands.

But yeah - technically, they're past college age in the book, but I think they really read that way to modern eyes ... and maybe even to the eyes of Fitzgerald's contemporaries, given how often Nick reflects back on his college years as a sort of high point and molding experience for the next stage of his life.

It's kind of a relief that the inconsistent timelines wasn't just down to me misremembering/misreading! I wasn't actually paying that much attention to that aspect of the book for the most part, but the one I particularly noticed was Gatsby's dad and the book with the notes in it, which supposedly were written by Gatsby in 1906, which would have made him ... six? Eight?

Oh no not just you, it's something many many critics have talked about in various ways. The saddest effect it had was, as his biographer says, that after his first book, Fitzgerald was stamped as someone very careless and superficial and that followed both his career and person around til the very end of his life. When the guy was careless about pretty much everything BUT writing. Max Perkins was a famously great editor who could whip books into structural shape, but apparently he didn't proofread at all, and Fitzgerald was really touchy about his spelling and formatting. (He didn't want the French in TITN italicized at all, for example.) In a way it's kind of dumb nitpicking, but the deeper problem is that like you say, once the reader kind of has a chance to absorb the mistakes in chronology it really knocks you out of the story. Which is just a damn shame, since his writing is so immersive.

the entire book is about Gatsby's life being a Jenga tower of lies

JENGA TOWER OF LIES <33

in fact I occasionally wondered, as I was reading, if Nick was leaving things out, lying, or misrepresenting events to cast Gatsby and/or himself in a better light. By the end of the book I didn't think so, I mean not to the extent that it's the sort of book where you finish up with the realization that the narrator left out something huge that the reader was supposed to have picked up on.

Oh yeah there's a lot of debate over whether or not Nick is an unreliable narrator, too. I think you're right that we're not supposed to think he is -- he's subjective and partial, but there's some stuff in the book that's almost just straight reporting, like Myrtle's death, Gatsby's death, Gatsby courting Daisy, &c &c. Of course the conceit is various people have told him stuff, but at that point his narrative voice and the authorial voice blend together. He's like Marlow in Heart of Darkness -- Fitzgerald was a big admirer of Conrad.

It does make me think that Gatsby dying at the point when he does, and in the way that he does, is perhaps the least interesting thing that could actually have happened to him at that point, when he's just come face to face with evidence that Daisy really is that blithe and shallow; she ran over a woman in the street and left her to die! I mean, on the one hand, it's obviously what the book was building up towards, but it also takes any choice about what to do from there on out (with Daisy, with the rest of his life) out of his hands.

Yeah, he would have to RADICALLY change (altho in fact Fitzgerald didn't really change when he found out about Zelda's affair, they just kept going -- what permanently changed their marriage was his illness). But Daisy is synonymous with Gatsby's dream of success (what is that, meotnymy?) and also the illusions of success in general and even the American Dream ideal of success, and Gatsby has spent literally about half his life worshiping her and trying to succeed in a way he thinks will win her back. And not only does Daisy kill Myrtle, but IIRC Tom is the one who passes on the lie to Wilson that it was Gatsby, so they're each responsible for the death of the others' lover. (It's such a patterned book, I love it.)

maybe even to the eyes of Fitzgerald's contemporaries, given how often Nick reflects back on his college years as a sort of high point and molding experience for the next stage of his life.

Yeah, for Fitzgerald the high point of his youth was Princeton (which he also lost, when he flunked out) and he met Zelda while he was in the army but he never got over, as they say, which mattered to him terribly all his life. (Hemingway, who did famously get over, thought this was extremely stupid. It's a good example of Fitzgerald's combined naivete and romanticism.) So he either glosses over or summarizes war service for his characters -- in his first novel there's like a two-page "interlude" which is supposed to substitute for the protagonist's combat experience! Nick's job, too, is vague and doesn't seem to take up much of his interest or time, and how Gatsby makes his money is never fully explained, like Heathcliff's wealth (although with Gatsby, again, the sense of confusion and illusion actually works). Fitzgerald often shows the corrupting side of idle luxury, but one of his biographers said he never really wrote about the details of work until his last, unfinished novel, about the famous Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. Altho Fitzgerald himself was a very hard worker, all his life -- and I think he never worked harder than he did on this novel, he was really pushing himself and knew that he was accomplishing a great thing by doing so. (And so, naturellement, although it got great reviews, the sales flopped.)

I didn't read the novel til grad school and I was surprised how much I loved it. I actually have a theory that certain books shouldn't be read at certain ages (i.e. high school), because they don't resonate well and students tend to resent them so much. (Like what 15 year old gets Madame Bovary, for example???)

Yeah, I think so too. I read voraciously as a teenager, but my relationship to the Great Literature I had to read was ambivalent at best. I did enjoy some of it (I do think the mid-teens are about the right time to read Catcher in the Rye, which I really enjoyed at the time and probably wouldn't like now) but I don't think I had the mental tools to really understand or appreciate a lot of it at the time; I enjoyed most of the famous literary books I read in my 20s-30s much more. Then again, being able to choose your own reading material and read those books for fun rather than as an academic requirement probably made a difference too.

I also have not read this novel (in fact I can't even remember which ones I did read in the high school curriculum), so now with this vote of confidence I might give it a shot. (Mostly because you said it reads very contemporary...a lot of the classics really throw me now because of how much writing styles change over the years.) And I can always use more inspiration for vivid writing. :-)

It does - at least to my eyes. It took a page or two for me to get into the rhythm of it - I think the very beginning and end have less clear, transparent prose than the rest of it, at least that was my takeaway. But in general I really did enjoy it a lot.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I couldn't stand it when I had to read it in high school, but when I reread it as an adult I was able to appreciate the things it does really well. It's skillfully written, and wonderfully evocative. I still do personally hate it (I just don't get on with books where I dislike every single character, because I don't want to spend time with them) but unlike when I was a teenager I am able to understand why other people like this book so much.

I think we do a disservice to a lot of classic literature by forcing teenagers to read certain books before they're really able to see/appreciate what the book is doing.

The Great Gatsby

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