The Great Gatsby II

     I have unearthed a review of this wonderful book which I find I wrote, to my consternation nineteen years ago. I find also that what I wrote then and what I wrote this week aren't so very different.  I have largely kept the text as printed, dropping in the odd word or phrase [in square brackets] where they might help the clarity of the text.

     There are certain books, a 'Canon' of texts, that stand out from the others around them and transcend the era in which they are written.  This book is one of them.  'The Great Gatsby' is set in Twenties America.  This is the 'Jazz Age'.  And as expected this is a novel of excess, rather, it is a book that dwells of excess.  The style is in fact succinct and direct, marking a change from his previous two novels which still have a 'nineteenth century' feel to them.  The sentences are crisper, words are not wasted. The plot too is carefully, skillfully put together.  It is simple and clear, a concentrated work.  Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and hugely wealthy young man attempts to get close to a society woman, Daisy, once his lover and now married to plutocrat Tom Buchannan. thse story is narrated by Nick Caraway, a cousin of Daisy, who after the Great War has moved out east to make a fortune on the New York money markets.  renting a house on Long Island he finds himself the neighbour of Gatsby, and his neighbour finds [in Nick] the key that will unlock to him the world which daisy inhabits.  The novel describes, painfully, the results of this.
     Fitzgerald once remarked to Ernest Hemingway the "the rich aren't like you and me."  To which Hemmingway replied; "Yes, they're richer."  To Fitzgerald they were objects of fascination and unease, perhaps even disgust.  To some extent Scott wrote to become rich, and he himself became emblematic of the period [of American history] although his novels are critical of the amorality of twenties America.  This ambivalence is reflected in the book, so that for Marxist theorists Tom and Daisy become ciphers for a whole class, but in the end Hemmingway was right.  Tom is simply a villain and Daisy's motivation is mixed materialism and ordinary fear.  Indeed all the main characters, with the exception of the narrator, are corrupt and corrupting.  Our sympathies though, lie with Gatsby because we have a 'Romantic' view of love, just as he does. Like Gatsby we believe that that people should follow their desires, even though, in his case, they are irrational and obsessive and lead ultimately to his criminality.  In the final pages of the book Scott compares Gatsby's' desire for sel-fullfilment, which incidentally started off as old-fashioned self-improvement, with the American Dram - a passage for me of great emotional intensity - but Gatsby's struggle, perhaps like America's, is ultimately futile because it is based solely on desire.