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The Great Gatsby is the single most iconic novel of the Roaring Twenties or “Jazz Age”, and, more broadly, of 20th-century American literature — the American High School curriculum has undoubtedly contributed to this illustrious reputation. It doesn’t look like much though. Just a short novel (under 200 pages) recounting a tragic experience occurred to a bunch of Long Island hedonistic upstarts who spend their time boozing, smoking, dancing foxtrot, pool-partying, golfing and cheating on each other, all possibly to forget the traumas of the First World War. In comparison, Marcel Proust’s diner parties descriptions, before the War, seem a bit prim, starchy and bundled up.
The genius of Fitzgerald lies in the fact that his narrator (as in Proust) tells his story after the fact and with some degree of detachment. Such that it all seems like an insane, slightly sad and ultimately inessential pageant. The drama of the love triangle and the eventual tragic denouement is seen as though through a softening lens. The way Fitzgerald uses ellipses and euphemisms is quite striking as well. For instance, this sentence towards the end, when the narrator stares at the swimming pool: “A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.” (Penguin Classics, p. 172 — I won’t decode this now to avoid spoilers, but I encourage you, faithful readers, to check it out.)
His description of places, people and atmosphere — the glamorous, glittering, glimmering fairy-girls, the hyper-gaudy, twinkling, moonlit, colourful hanky-pankies, the scorching, golden heatwave over a Versailles-like New York — are all powerfully evocative, dream-like almost. The crepuscular ending, a Whitmanian suggestion of the American myth as a transient, unreal garden of earthly delights — which soon enough will be turned into a valley of ashes, fuming under the stare of giant billboards —, is both elegiac and sublime.
Gatsby himself, described as radiant by the narrator (the epithet “the great” puts him, oddly enough, on par with kings and emperors), seems, in fact, a bit depressed, lonely, detached from the world. He is, in short, a blurry, suave, ascetic onlooker amidst the outpouring of luxury and licence of a gigantic courtship ritual — and, frankly, his compulsion to call everyone “old sport” is a bit tiring. Tom Buchanan is a livelier character, but quite obviously an entitled sexist, racist, and an insufferable brutal asshole. The female characters, Jordan, Daisy, Myrtle, by contrast, are cute little flappers but singularly lacking in intensity.
The Great Gatsby is many things at once in a short format. A novel about the luxurious and decadent parties of the narrator’s mysterious neighbour — redolent of Trimalchio’s banquet in Petronius’s Satyricon. The Great Gatsby is also about a narrator fascinated by and reporting (more or less credibly) on a shadowy, romantic, elusive figure — Nick Carraway on Jay Gatsby, like, say, Ishmael on Ahab in Moby-Dick. The Great Gatsby is also a novel about a romantic and domestic tragedy. And finally, this novel provides an outline for Hardboiled Fiction, which achieved enormous success only a decade later, with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) offered an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel in 2013, with Leo DiCaprio in the title role — I haven’t watched this movie yet. However, the fascinating Spring Breakers (same year, with James Franco and Selena Gomez) might well be considered a contemporary take on Fitzgerald’s masterpiece... Or, for that matter, just any other Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj’s careless wondermilk-flowing pool-partying music video!
The genius of Fitzgerald lies in the fact that his narrator (as in Proust) tells his story after the fact and with some degree of detachment. Such that it all seems like an insane, slightly sad and ultimately inessential pageant. The drama of the love triangle and the eventual tragic denouement is seen as though through a softening lens. The way Fitzgerald uses ellipses and euphemisms is quite striking as well. For instance, this sentence towards the end, when the narrator stares at the swimming pool: “A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.” (Penguin Classics, p. 172 — I won’t decode this now to avoid spoilers, but I encourage you, faithful readers, to check it out.)
His description of places, people and atmosphere — the glamorous, glittering, glimmering fairy-girls, the hyper-gaudy, twinkling, moonlit, colourful hanky-pankies, the scorching, golden heatwave over a Versailles-like New York — are all powerfully evocative, dream-like almost. The crepuscular ending, a Whitmanian suggestion of the American myth as a transient, unreal garden of earthly delights — which soon enough will be turned into a valley of ashes, fuming under the stare of giant billboards —, is both elegiac and sublime.
Gatsby himself, described as radiant by the narrator (the epithet “the great” puts him, oddly enough, on par with kings and emperors), seems, in fact, a bit depressed, lonely, detached from the world. He is, in short, a blurry, suave, ascetic onlooker amidst the outpouring of luxury and licence of a gigantic courtship ritual — and, frankly, his compulsion to call everyone “old sport” is a bit tiring. Tom Buchanan is a livelier character, but quite obviously an entitled sexist, racist, and an insufferable brutal asshole. The female characters, Jordan, Daisy, Myrtle, by contrast, are cute little flappers but singularly lacking in intensity.
The Great Gatsby is many things at once in a short format. A novel about the luxurious and decadent parties of the narrator’s mysterious neighbour — redolent of Trimalchio’s banquet in Petronius’s Satyricon. The Great Gatsby is also about a narrator fascinated by and reporting (more or less credibly) on a shadowy, romantic, elusive figure — Nick Carraway on Jay Gatsby, like, say, Ishmael on Ahab in Moby-Dick. The Great Gatsby is also a novel about a romantic and domestic tragedy. And finally, this novel provides an outline for Hardboiled Fiction, which achieved enormous success only a decade later, with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) offered an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel in 2013, with Leo DiCaprio in the title role — I haven’t watched this movie yet. However, the fascinating Spring Breakers (same year, with James Franco and Selena Gomez) might well be considered a contemporary take on Fitzgerald’s masterpiece... Or, for that matter, just any other Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj’s careless wondermilk-flowing pool-partying music video!
