I don't think it's possible to overstate the value and pleasure of this slender novel. Set quite deliberately in 1922, written mostly in 1923, and published in 1925, it was as contemporary to its times, the so-called "Roaring '20s," as it could be. It so completely occupied them, in fact, that it came to practically overwhelm them. It packs in everything: the psychic fallout from World War I, the shallow mania for wealth, the widespread ongoing exodus from country to city, Prohibition and the gangsters it spawned, the rise of the automobile, and all of the hysteria and desperation and foolishness and exhilaration. The main points may now be found in an image on a U.S. postage stamp from 1998, but the emotional realities are detailed expertly in this novel. As a work of literature, it is at once so subtle and so complex that it has proved almost entirely resistant to conversion to film—Baz Luhrmann is reportedly the latest to give it the old college try, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan along for the ride. Good luck with that. They are the right names, I will say, or right enough, and if the picture is almost certainly doomed to failure I'm looking forward at least to a resurgence of interest in the book that it may engender, as I recall the failed attempt in 1974 of Jack Clayton and Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston accomplishing too. That's when the book first came to my attention anyway, and how I came to encounter this strange story of a man so quotidian, so mundane, and yet so extraordinarily obsessed with an incident in his past that he enters into the times with the sole intent of amassing a fortune he can use to enable him to attempt to recapture it. And the times happened to be right for him to do exactly that. Fitzgerald was a writer who plied his trade almost entirely by instinct, using the expedient tool of English language dedicated to varieties of fantastic and ineffable throughlines. His work is unified in the way it is all mad with romance, drunk on it, rich with extravagant notions and presumptuous images. It could be awful, lugubrious and indulgent and tin-eared and grossly misunderstanding of the terms of life for many. But when he caught the thrum of something vital, and nowhere did he do that better than he does here, he was capable of an almost monstrous beauty. In its language, its structure, its deceptively modest goals and its approach to the problems of the novel, it is almost perfect, with an uncanny ability to transform a lovely story, almost as if by accident—except that, by everything we know about the ambitions of Fitzgerald, it was anything but an accident—into one of the most profound observations of America that exists yet even today.
In case it's not at the library.
It wasn't a very good movie, but to this day, whenever I see Sam Waterston, I think "hey, it's Nick Carraway!"
ReplyDeleteThat's funny ! I still see Mia Farrow for Daisy every time I read the book. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
ReplyDeleteI see Mia, too! Sobbing into Gatsby's silk shirts about how beautiful they were. I want to shake her silly just as much now as I did then. Maybe Mulligan can bring some depth to Daisy that Mia couldn't. I hated Mia! But then I never liked the poor-little-rich-woman literary Daisy, either. That's probably what Fitz wanted us to feel about the shallow woman, so maybe Mia was simply brilliant?
ReplyDeleteIs it a flaw in the novel, surely Daisy could've been a little more complex. I don't know who women in general related to in this novel, maybe Jordan? They were too extreme, but hell, maybe women were extreme in the '20s because they had to be.
To this day I can't say that I've read an American novel more times than Gatsby and every time I read it, I'm forced to admit how brilliant it is. And I fight it! I want to say "But The Scarlet Letter is so much more brilliant! Huck Finn kicks its ass!" but the language and subject and themes are nowhere near as accessible as Gatsby. Dammit! ;-)
Good to see you blogging!
I cannot believe you've been blogging all this time and I just now noticed. I've been robbed.
ReplyDeleteYou tracked me down -- and it WOULD be this book!
ReplyDeleteYou know what, those are really some good questions about Daisy. I don't think she's supposed to be that likeable -- she and Tom go around smashing things and Nick Carraway doesn't approve of that. But would it kill Fitz to have even one sympathetic or at least realistic, complex woman in the thing, or in any of his things? I think you're pushing up against one of his many weaknesses. He can be a lovely romantic but it does leave him all too often knee-deep in his own self-reinforcing and all too obvious infatuations.
ReplyDeleteGreat summary of all this great book's virtues.
ReplyDeleteI actually just finished teaching this to mostly non-reading high schoolers and, let me tell you, this is no easy proposition, I assure you. They can come to appreciate the "monstrous beauty" of the language, or at least in short poetic bursts, but Nick's subtle analysis of character, class, and the American Dream go right over their Facebook-addled heads. By the end, some get the fine distinction between dreaming and the objects of our dreams in Fitzgerald's tragic view. When we read the last page together some sit stunned by the implications of Nick's closing remarks. Most, though, are angry and blame Gatsby.
And I'd agree female characters are a weakness. Oddly, though, for all her one-demensionality, Daisy has proven to be one of the most elusive aspects of the film adaptations. She can't be merely beautiful but has to move like music, like "money." It's this animated charm that obsesses Gatsby and draws other men to her like moths.
Anyway, great write up.