Posted on 05/07/2013 12:00:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard. The week we were to read Gertrude Stein’s notoriously challenging Tender Buttons, one student raised her hand and asked—bravely, I thought—if Menand had any advice about how best to approach it. In response, he offered up the closest thing to a beatific smile I have ever seen on the face of a book critic. “With pleasure,” he replied.
I have read The Great Gatsby five times. The first was in high school; the second, in college. The third was in my mid-twenties, stuck in a remote bus depot in Peru with someone’s left-behind copy. The fourth was last month, in advance of seeing the new film adaptation; the fifth, last week. There are a small number of novels I return to again and again: Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, maybe a half-dozen others. But Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.
I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.
I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book. So since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report.
The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired—fortune, mansion, entire persona—is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick’s cousin. Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Thanks to Nick, Gatsby and Daisy reunite, but she ultimately balks at the prospect of leaving Tom and, barreling back home in Gatsby’s car, kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run. Her husband, believing that Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle’s lover, tracks him to his mansion and shoots him. Finis, give or take some final reflections from Nick.
When this tale was published, in 1925, very few people aside from its author thought it was or would ever become an American classic. Unlike his first book—This Side of Paradise, which was hailed as the definitive novel of its era—The Great Gatsby emerged to mixed reviews and mediocre sales. Fewer than 24,000 copies were printed in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, and some were still sitting in a warehouse when he died, in 1940, at the age of 44. Five years later, the U.S. military distributed 150,000 copies to service members, and the book has never been out of print since. Untold millions of copies have sold, including 405,000 in the first three months of this year.
But sales figures don’t capture the contemporary Gatsby phenomenon. In recent years, the book has been reinvented as a much-admired experimental play (Gatz) and a Nintendo video game—“Grand Theft Auto, West Egg,” as the New York Times dubbed it. This Thursday, Stephen Colbert will host a Gatsby book club; the new movie opens Friday. (Read David Edelstein's review here.) If you need a place to take your date afterward and have $14,999 to spare, you can head to the Trump hotel, which is offering a glamorous “Great Gatsby Package”: three nights in a suite on Central Park West, a magnum of Champagne, cuff links and a tailored suit for men, and, “for the ladies, an Art Deco shagreen and onyx cuff, accompanied by a personal note from Ivanka Trump.” Car insurance is not included.
So Gatsby is on our minds, on our screens, on our credit cards, on top of the Amazon best-seller list. But even in quieter days, we never really forget Fitzgerald’s novel. It is, among other things, a pedagogical perennial, in part for obvious reasons. The book is short, easy to read, and full of low-hanging symbols, the most famous of which really do hang low over Long Island: the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock; the unblinking eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, that Jazz Age Dr. Zizmor. But the real appeal of the book, one assumes, is what it lets us teach young people about the political, moral, and social fabric of our nation. Which raises the question: To our students, and to ourselves, exactly what kind of Great Gatsby Package are we selling?
I will grant Fitzgerald this much: Somehow, in the five years between his literary debut and The Great Gatsby, he taught himself to write. This Side of Paradise is intermittently brilliant but terrifically uncontrolled. Gatsby, by contrast, is focused and deliberate: a single crystal, scrupulously polished.
It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.
Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.
Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else—love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement—the car accident and murder—of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.
Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald’s characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, “a moralist at heart.” He wanted to “preach at people,” and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means, say (Gatsby manipulates the American financial system and dies a martyr), or ignoring all plights from which they have the means to protect themselves. Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it—for, in H. L. Mencken’s words, “their glittering swinishness.”
Yet Fitzgerald also longed to be a glttering swine himself, and acted like one anytime he could afford it. “All big men have spent money freely,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. Given the means, he was only too happy to drape Zelda in furs, buy up the local Champagne supply, and throw Gatsby-worthy parties. These conflicted feelings about wealth bled into his work—and in fiction, as in life, piety and swinishness pair poorly. On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy. The glittering swinishness, by contrast, sometimes serves him well: There’s a reason Gatsby contains the best party scenes in American literature. But when you combine the two—when you apply a strict moral code to the saturnalian society to which you are attracted—you inevitably wind up a hypocrite. Jonathan Franzen once described Gatsby as “the central fable of America.” If so, it is the fable of the fox and the grapes: a story about people who criticize precisely what they covet.
That’s an interesting tension, common to most of us and great fodder for fiction. But rather than explore it, Gatsby enacts it. As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit. Our position throughout is that of an innocent bystander. That’s also Nick’s role, so the perspective of the book becomes one of passive observation. He watches across apartments as affairs take place, across parties as fights break out, across the road where the dead Myrtle’s left breast flaps leerishly loose. Yet he never admits to collusion with or seduction by all the fabulous depravity around him. After it’s all over, he retreats to the Midwest and, figuratively and literally, tells his story from the safe remove of America’s imaginary moral high ground.
In This Side of Paradise, in many of his short stories, and especially in his nonfiction, Fitzgerald displays a quick and often mordant wit. Then, suddenly, that voice vanishes; The Great Gatsby might be the least funny book about rich people ever written. The British, who kick our ass at writing about class, know how useful a dash of humor is—how it can lift up or deflate, jostle or soothe, comfort or eviscerate. (In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.) In leaving that note out, Fitzgerald is not just making a stylistic choice, nor even just signaling his solemnity of purpose. He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-person sanctimonious. From the story of America’s self-consuming profligacy, corruption, and avarice, he omits himself and his moral proxy—and, by extension, us.
I can only sketch here the many other things that trouble me about Gatsby and its place in our culture. There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin. (Don’t talk to me about the standards of his time; the man hell-bent on being the voice of his generation was a contemporary of Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, not to mention the great groundswell of activists who achieved the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet here he is in A Short Autobiography: “Women learn best not from books or from their own dreams but from reality and from contact with first-class men.”)
I can’t say more here about any of these. But allow me, in its fullness, one last apostasy. Every time I read the book’s beloved final line, I roll my eyes. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”: What a shame that Fitzgerald wasted such a lovely image on such an insufferable voice. Even as that faux “we” promises intimacy, the words drift down to us from on high—condescending, self-serious, detached from genuine human struggle. I’m sorry, but in the moral universe of The Great Gatsby, we are not all in the same boat. We are all up above it, watching—with prurient fascination, with pious opprobrium, watching and watching and doing nothing at all.
I was thinking you did a pretty good job!
“Simply dreadful, uninspired and soulless.”
Kind of like too much of our country today, no?
Gatsby is America.
He’s a poor boy from fly-over country who wants to better himself. He changes his name from the unpleasant Jimmy Gatz to the elegant Jay Gatsby. America is where anyone can reinvent himself.
The Army gives him a chance. Gatsby is smart and resourceful and is promoted to major. There is no class system in the military (just like there’s no official class system in America). You can rise to whatever level you’re smart enough to reach.
In a uniform, Gatsby is welcome at the homes of the rich and fabulous. He meets and wins a famous Southern belle — but can’t have her, because the war ends and he isn’t an officer anymore and she’s afraid to be poor.
He becomes a successful criminal, because he needs big money fast to win back Daisy.
It all falls apart. But other Americans have succeeded wildly where Gatsby failed.
The Great Gatsby is a distilled glimpse of the beauty and promise of America. That’s all it is, and all it’s about.
And if you can’t see that, or even FINISH SUCH A SHORT BOOK, sit down and be quiet. The grown-ups are talking about America’s greatest novel.
“What sort of act did they have? My grandfather had a tumble act in the ‘30s. He taught a young, really good-looking guy from Harlem everything he knew. That fella went on to a long and successful career in Hollywood.”
They were a dance team, ‘Cunningham and Clements’. They knew George M. Cohan and Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele.
They took their act on a world tour, George M. told them not too, that Hollywood, which was silent, was going to open up with talkies. They didn’t think so and left for Australia....
they were wrong. When they came back Vaudville was dead, or gasping it’s dying breathe.
Oh, jeez! The woman presents a detailed, and in my view persuasive critique of the work, and what do we have to say to counter her criticisms? “I’ve always liked it” and “hidden communist agenda”?
Full disclosure: I never liked it, never disliked it, never quite understood its appeal, ignored it. But that’s just moi.
You have to be kidding! “We can do better than this sticker patch!”. And the scene where the old man ties his arm to the mast with all the fingers but one tied down? Come on! What book reveals America better?
I never could force myself to read it. Before this thread, all I knew was that it involved someone named Gatsby and was set somewhere in the general vicinity of New York City. I never saw the movie either. So for me this has been a useful critique.
Of all the novels I haven't read yet, I think there are quite a few that I want to get to sooner than The Great Gatsby.
Wow, they were famous. Saw they have two movie credits on IMDB. (Today, the closest thing we have to vaudeville is YouTibe)
ONE THING NO ONE NOTICED:
She doesn't like Gatsby, but she read it 5 times! And twice this year!
If a book can inspire someone who doesn't like it to read it 5 times, I say bravo. I can only say I hope to write something like that.
“Wow, they were famous. Saw they have two movie credits on IMDB. (Today, the closest thing we have to vaudeville is YouTibe)”
Really? They were famous but I didn’t know this. Can you send me the link?
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
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I guess this is sort of like when you say a word over and over again until it starts to have no meaning. If you read something over and over again or hear about it time and time again and see it used as a key to the American experience, it's going to leave you cold after a while.
Academics like to pretend that they can read the same book over and over again year after year and still discover things in it. But that's just something they tell students to encourage them. Plenty of teachers and professors go mad from having to read the same books over and over again. Of course it doesn't help if one is particularly shallow, but even deep people want a change every once in a while.
What she's basically saying is she's tired of Gatsby and she starts comparing it to other, very different works and finding it wanting. Gatsby isn't James or Proust or whoever. Read it on its own terms. Take it for what it is, not for what it isn't or couldn't be (and remember that T.S. Eliot called it "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James").
My suggestion to her is: apply the same standards to other books. Compare Gatsby to ten novels published this year or ten novels published in 1925. Compare it to Fitzgerald's other novels. Tell me if Gatsby is really worse than comparable works. If you're as critical of everything as she is of Gatsby, chances are you won't find anything really worth reading.
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This week I found out something new about Gatsby. The end of the book I read in school had a sentence: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." This week I found out that Fitzgerald actually wrote "orgastic."
His Princeton friend, the critic Edmund Wilson assumed this was a misspelling -- Fitzgerald was a horrible speller and a much worse student than Wilson -- and "corrected" it to "orgiastic." If you think about it a while, it says a lot about both men which word they chose.
Good post. It's a parlor game people play. There's a competitive oneupmanship involved. People aren't coming out and saying "this is good" or "I like this" but are playing with estimations and expectations in such a way as to come up with the answer that will beat out the others.
And the thing is, we usually base our answers on what our teachers told us in high school or college, which may have been a long time ago. I suspect that Hemingway and Salinger aren't as highly esteemed by teachers today, and therefore aren't really "overrated" anymore.
... or at least could enjoy Miami Vice?
She must really enjoy Wuthering Heights.
I liked the “Great Gatsby” book. It didn’t bore me and it didn’t knock my socks off. It could become a great movie if anyone got the characters to matter. I’m old enough to hope that happens soon as I don’t think I have too many shots at it.
You are both right.
I love to read. I read every thing from stuff so complex that I have to draw a diagram to tell who is doing what to who to simple sweet stories with plots you can out line with a dozen words.
Gatsby and Catcher are two works of fiction I can not stand.
I love this review. I have been forced to read the book several times as well, in high school and college, and I was an English major for far too long. Finally I understand why I hated it. Not only is the voice of the book exactly as this reviewer says, divorced from itself in an unrealistic way, separated from truth and emotion, but it doesn’t even fit with Fitzgerald himself. It’s as if he was fooling himself and writing it from inside a phony persona.
It has always bothered me that I didn’t get this book’s greatness and now I feel vindicated.
My grandfather's act was called "The Two Jacks" and at one time included Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat. They went to Hollywood and urged my grandpa to follow as there was plenty of work. The stubborn old Irishman repeatedly turned them down.
I saw the new movie tonight...I'll give it 4 stars out of 5. All in all, it blows the doors off the '74 Redford shipwreck.
My biggest problem? Some parts of the soundtrack kept a good film from being a great film. If you've watched the trailers, you'll know that there's a lot of contemporary music. In some places it's quite effective; in others, not so much. Early on in the film when Nick is giving the backdrop of the frenetic craziness, energy and chaos of NYC in the early 20's, there's some goofy rap. While it's obvious they're trying to communicate the fast pace and rythm of the city, the bustle of Wall Street, etc. it seems grotesquely out of place, and coming so early in the film, I was thinking, "God I hope it's not like this through the whole movie." Thankfully it wasn't.
There were a couple of scenes (Tom and Myrtle's secret hideaway, the speakeasy with Meyer Wolfshiem) where the soundtrack has a kind of fusion with 20's jazz and more contemporary music that works a little better, and some of the romantic scenes have a contemporary, haunting melancholy tune that is perfectly appropriate.
As I stated elsewhere on the thread, about the only redeeming factor of the '74 film was Waterston's performance as Nick Carraway, which is IMHO, one of the best casting choices in the history of Hollywood; that opinion remains unchanged. Going into the movie, I thought Toby McGuire would have the biggest shoes to fill, and he did. While I think Waterston's performance was still better, I'm guessing McGuire closely studied Waterston and managed to capture a lot of the essence of the character.
DiCaprio is one of those actors who runs hot or cold, and he knocked this one out of the park. To the casual observer his accent and speech will seem overly affected, but it's consistent with Gatsby's origins and conscious effort to integrate in high society. I was very impressed with his performance in the scene where Gatsby is reunited with Daisy at Nick's cottage over tea. He exhibits all the awestruck anxiety, shyness and blushing apprehension that compromise (and strongly humanize) the heretofore cool, debonair and mysterious Gatsby.
A tip of the hat also goes to Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan. He's perfectly brutish, coarse and arrogant. He's clearly a far more physical actor than Bruce Dern, and is very convincing as a Yale football star, polo player, etc.
Now, if you plan on going to see it, at least take into consideration the following thought: I've never been a fan of 3D movies, and indeed, saw the standard 2D version. I'm considering going back and seeing this one in 3D. Some of the cityscapes of 1920's NYC looked like they'd have been even more impressive in 3D, and I think some of the views across the channel between Gatsby's mansion and the Buchanan's home were purposely shot for 3D to enhance the psychological distance between Gatsby and Daisy's worlds.
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