"The Great Gatsby" is considered by many to be the zenith of American fiction writing in the last century. I won't say that it is the best American novel I've read but I will say it is probably the most perfect.

Along with J.D. Salinger, Fitzgerald has got to be my favorite writer of fiction. As opposed to Hemingway's bluntness, and Faulkner's artiness, Fitzgerald's prose seems(to paraphrase Michael Chabon) to rain down from style heaven. His style in fact is like the ladies he writes about: cool, lean and absolutely enchanting. He would never dream of overwriting and knows exactly when to hold back for maximum effect. His use of the language is assured and consequently eminently readable. For that alone this should be considered the Mona Lisa of prose.

What is astounding though is how he puts his sparsely elegant style to use giving his characters shade and depth. Fitzgerald is a true student of humanity and his skills of observation are razor sharp. He sums up his characters in sentences that read like aphorisms bulging with truth about the human condition. There's not a page goes by I'm not gasping at the depth of his vision and the economy he uses to express it.

So far I've dwelt on how he wrote and not on what he wrote. People who'd back another nag in the Great American Novel derby knock Fitzgerald's sophomoric (their word not mine) obsession with romance between men and women. They reduce his works to the level of melodramatic tear jerkers. This is a gross simplification of his talents. Yes "Gatsby" focuses on a doomed love affair but it does so to illustrate the errors in thinking that he felt marred his generation.

Gatsby is about the hollowness of the American dream as dreamt in the twenties. Fitzgerald looked around him (and in the mirror)and saw men and women locked in a frenzied and ultimatley doomed race for speed, money and sin. Gatsby and Daisy's love is doomed because their values have been distorted by money and comfort and opulence. They cannot see the depths because they are too easily distracted by shiny surfaces. When Daisy cries as Gatsby shows off his elegantly tailored shirts because she has never seen clothes so beautiful sums up perfectly how for her exteriors matter most. This is at the heart of the tragedy that unfolds before us in this delicious little novel.

There is no denying this is one of the GREAT BOOKS. If you haven't read it do so. I dare you to not fall in love with it.

At some point in high school, a usually supercilious teacher stands in front of a group of highly suggestive students and holds up a copy of The Great Gatsby waxing poetic about how it is such a marvelous masterpiece.

tAnd—make no mistake—it is. After the eager, young students read The Great Gatsby, the inevitable conclusion is that no piece of literature will ever come close to reaching this impossibly high standard. What isn’t always readily apparent is twofold.

tOne. The Great Gatsby wasn’t Fitzgerald’s first novel. It was his third after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and then The Beautiful and Damned. He also churned out plays and short stories. He developed his writing skills over the years.

tTwo. The Great Gatsby didn’t just magically flow from the tip of Fitzgerald’s pencil. There were several drafts of The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald wrote this book over a span of years; it took nearly three years for The Great Gatsby to go from the planning phase to ultimate publication. Three years.

As early as June 1922, Fitzgerald began planning The Great Gatsby according to Matthew Bruccoli in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (page 53), and in October 1922, Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck, Long Island (West Egg), the primary setting for the book. In a letter dated to Willa Cather, Fitzgerald said that he was “in the middle of the first draft A Lost Lady [Willa Cather’s novel] was published.” A Lost Lady was published in 1923. Finally, The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925.

tFun Fact: In the very earliest versions of The Great Gatsby, Daisy was named Ada, and Nick was named Dud.

tIn the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, you can see that the famous quotes weren’t quite refined yet. For example, in the manuscript, “an extraordinary aliveness to life, an alert vitality such as I have never found in any human person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again,” doesn’t quite stir the soul as much as, “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

tThe manuscript mentions psychic radio, garbage men, and dope. None of which found their way into the published version.

tThe manuscript also shows where Fitzgerald struggled—there are many drafts of the confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby. Further, in the manuscript, Daisy was much more into Gatsby, confiding in Nick that she plans to leave Tom in a couple of months and then she shows up at Gatsby’s house with her things packed, ready to run away with him. Later, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter that he could never quite nail Daisy’s reaction. However, I would argue that the published version is ideal because it mimics the authentic feel of love where one may know his or her own feelings but is not completely sure if the other person fully reciprocates.

tInstead of setting impossibly high standards, the manuscript makes writing more accessible. With perhaps enough versions and revisions, greatness is within reach. Or one can hope.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $240 from SP Books

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Oh Gatsby, you old sport, you poor semi-delusionally hopeful dreamer with “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, focusing your whole self and soul on that elusive money-colored green light - a dream that shatters just when you are *this* close to it.

n  n

Jay Gatsby, who dreamed a dream with the passion and courage few possess - and the tragedy was that it was a wrong dream colliding with reality that was even more wrong - and deadly.

Just like the Great Houdini - the association the title of this book so easily invokes - you specialized in illusions and escape. Except even the power of most courageous dreamers can be quite helpless to allow us escape the world, our past, and ourselves, giving rise to one of the most famous closing lines of a novel.

n  “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”n

Dear Gatsby, not everything I liked back when I was fourteen has withstood the test of time¹ - but you clearly did, and as I get older, closer to your and Nick Carraway's age, your story gathers more dimensions and more tragedy, fleshing out so much more from what I thought of as a tragic love story when I was a child - turning into a great American tragedy.

¹ I hang my head in shame at my ability to still belt out an enthusiastic (albeit poorly rendered) version of '...Baby One More Time' when it comes on the radio (provided, of course, that my car windows are safely up).

I blame it on my residual teenage hormones.

n

Jay Gatsby, you barged head-on to achieve and conquer your American dream, not stopping until your dreams became your reality, until you reinvented yourself with the dizzying strength of your belief. Your tragedy was that you equated your dream with money, and money with happiness and love. And honestly, given the messed up world we live in, you were not that far from getting everything you thought you wanted, including the kind of love that hinges on the green dollar signs.

And you *almost* saw it, you poor bastard, but in the end you chose to let your delusion continue, you poor soul.

Poor Gatsby! Yours is the story of a young man who suddenly rose to wealth and fame, running like a hamster on the wheel amassing wealth for the sake of love, for the sake of winning the heart of a Southern belle, the one whose n  “voice is full of money”n - in a book written by a young man who suddenly rose to wealth and fame, desperately running on the hamster wheel of 'high life' to win the heart of his own Southern belle. Poor Gatsby, and poor F. Scott Fitzgerald - the guy who so brilliantly described it all, but who continued to live the life his character failed to see for what it was.

n  n

The Great Gatsby is a story about the lavish excesses meant to serve every little whim of the rich and wannabe-rich in the splendid but unsatisfying in their shallow emptiness glitzy and gaudy post-war years, and the resulting suffocation under the uselessness and unexpected oppressiveness of elusive American dream in the time when money was plenty and the alluring seemingly dream life was just around the corner, just within reach.

But first and foremost, it is a story of disillusionment with dreams that prove to be shallow and unworthy of the dreamer - while at the same time firmly hanging on to the idea of the dream, the ability to dream big, and the stubborn tenacity of the dreamer, n  “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”n.

n  n

This is why Gatsby is still so relevant in the world we live in - almost a hundred years after Fitzgerald wrote it in the Roaring Twenties - the present-day world that still worships money and views it as a substitute for the American dream, the world that hinges on materialism, the world that no longer frowns on the gaudiness and glitz of the nouveau riche.

In this world Jay Gatsby, poor old sport, with his huge tasteless mansion and lavish tasteless parties and in-your-face tasteless car and tasteless pink suit would be, perhaps, quietly sniggered at - but would have fit in without the need for aristocratic breeding - who cares if he has the money and the ability to throw parties worthy of reality show fame???

n  n

Because in the present world just the fact of having heaps of money makes you worthy - and therefore the people whose voices are “full of money”, who are “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”, people who genuinely believe that money makes them worthy and invincible are all too common. Tom and Daisy Buchanan would be proud of them.

And wannabe Gatsbys pour their capacity to dream into chasing the shallow dream of dollar signs, nothing more.

n  “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”n  
n  
n  n

This book somehow hit the right note back when I read it when I was fourteen, and hit even truer note now, deeply resonating with me now, almost a full century since it was written. If you read it for school years ago, I ask you to pick it up and give its pages another look - and it may amaze you.

Five green-light stars in the fog at the end of a dock.

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Also posted on my blog.