The Great Gatsby

In anticipation of yet another film adaptation, which will likely be horrible, considering Baz Luhrmann is the director, I've reread The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel. It's a good thing, too, because I read it so long ago (and not for school) that I forgot almost everything in it.

This novel is considered one of the best American novels ever written. It was published in 1925, and has become one those books that capture a time period--in this case, the jazz age, with an abundance of wealth, flappers, fancy cars, and mansions on Long Island sound. But what makes it so American is that its central character is a prime example of how Americans have always had a knack for reinvention.

The book is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who has moved to New York and taken a job as a bond salesman. He rents a small house in West Egg (a stand-in for Great Neck) right next door to a grand mansion owned by a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby (one sign that this takes place a long time ago--nobody could rent cheap right on the water today). Nick is fascinated by the man, who he only sees from afar, until he wanders into one of his parties. Everyone has theories about Gatsby's past, and how he made his millions. Most suspect he is a bootlegger.

Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, is married to a brutish old money fellow named Tom, who is having an affair with the wife of a motley garage owner, George Wilson. This is pretty much an open secret, as he has Nick and Jordan Baker, a professional golfer and beauty, for a visit with his mistress, Myrtle. When she brings up Daisy, though, Tom breaks her nose.

Each chapter is a get-together of sorts, whether it's one of Gatsby's shindigs, where he almost hides from the guests, or a lunch with Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's friend and business associate. Wolfsheim was modeled on gambler Arnold Rothstein, or so we can imagine when we are told that Wolfsheim fixed the 1919 World Series. We finally learn that Daisy and Gatsby, whose real name was James Gatz, from North Dakota, had a love affair prior to the Great War. Gatsby now wants her back, taken away from the unpleasant Tom.

The narrative of Nick Carraway is now something of a cliche, frequently seen in movies--the reflection of a great person through the eyes of someone far more ordinary. This device is usually a way for the audience to enter the story--we can't identify with Gatsby, who is meant to be a mystery, so we view him through Nick's eyes. And Nick is a delightful narrator to have as a companion. I read an old paperback edition, and I dog-eared several pages. Here is his first description of the title character: "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there is something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

This is a description of the nights at Gatsby's mansion. It doesn't get much better than this: "There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." Nick, with the voice of Fitzgerald, shares with us such pearls of wisdom as: "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." And there is very dry humor, such as when Nick realizes it's his 30th birthday: "Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

The book is really more about Nick than Gatsby, who is never really more than a shadow figure, defined by his love for Daisy--everything he has done has been to win her back. And this is rickety structure, for Daisy isn't exactly a paragon of virtue. In the one scene in the novel that I don't think works, in a room at the Plaza Hotel, Gatsby and Tom argue over Daisy, right in front of Nick and Jordan. The story gets away from Fitzgerald for a while. It was hard to believe all this would go on and then the party would drive back in two cars to Long Island, where a tragedy would occur that would set in motion the fall of Gatsby.

If the plot of The Great Gatsby isn't exactly what makes it great, one can rely on the prose. Again and again there are more passages to quote, such as this one about Daisy's youth: "For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythms of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor."

Finally, there is the last sentence, one of the most famous in American literature: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." That sentence is almost a novel in itself, ripe with meaning, although one may take away a different meaning than the man next to him. I see it as something of the myth of Sisyphus, who rolled a rock to the top of a mountain only to have it fall back down again. Fitzgerald speaks of the same endless task, only within the context of a young man in a golden age, unable to enjoy life, feeling he is condemned to relive it without learning anything.