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 on 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.  The 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 self-fulfilment, which incidentally started off as old-fashioned self-improvement, with the American Dream - 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.

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 out 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 enthral 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.