The Great Gatsby I

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

     Today - the 10th of April 2025 - marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of one of the finest American novels of the 2oth century - perhaps even the finest - 'The Great Gatsby'.  It was F Scott Fitzgerald's 3rd published novel and it seems to me to be the distillation of the art.  The very essence.   The American critic Charles R Jackson called it 'the only flawless novel in the history of American literature.'

    Comparatively short, succinct but not parsimonious in style - to quote T S Eliot:

 where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together

       - there is something deeply satisfying about this novel.  It is one my favourite books.  It is a book I have returned to time and again.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

      I suppose the plot is simple enough - it is a small enough tragedy, though scandalous. Yet 'costing not less than everything' - to quote T S Eliot again.  It is the attempt of the narrator to put something right.  The story of Jay Gatsby and his loves, and how he is mastered by them.  The setting is the plutocratic world of Long Island, and New York, but also, fleetingly and movingly, 'the forgotten Swede towns' of the Mid-west. (Both Gatsby and the narrator it turns our are, like Fitzgerald himself, Mid-westerners.) It is the early 1920s and it is the 'Jazz Age'. Gatsby, I think, is rather like Miss Jean Brodie, in that both eminently charismatic but ultimately flawed characters who are unseated by their desire for the absolute.  Both are cultural Romantics of a very 19th century cast and are brought down by an adversary who is more ruthless than they.  And both are characters that enthrall the reader, offering the prospect of a live lived 'purified' of the dross, yet are really morally compromised, and, in the case of Jean Brodie a comic grotesque.  Gatsby is certainly not that.