Daisy is inconveniently married to the brutish Tom Buchanan, who, in turn, is carrying on with a married woman, the doomed Myrtle. Gatsby, it turns out, is pining for Nick’s cousin, Daisy his glittering life is a lure to impress her, win her back. You recall Nick Carraway, our narrator, who moves next door to the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby on Long Island. One of the pleasures of writing about a book as widely read as “The Great Gatsby” is jetting through the obligatory plot summary. Within the scaffold of its tidy, three-act structure and its carefully patterned symmetries, sprouts an unruly blend of stiff moralism and wild ambivalence, its infatuation with and contempt for wealth, its empathy alongside its desire to punish its characters. It’s the greatness of a vastly open, unstable, slithery text. Great - but not the greatness of assurance and cut-gem perfection. Eliot called “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” - or, as Gore Vidal put it, as Gore Vidal would, the work of a writer who was “barely literate”?Įven admirers have their own debates: The book is good, but great?
With “The Great Gatsby,” the question is simpler and stranger: Can Fitzgerald write? Is the book a masterpiece - what T.S. Is there a major novel so established in the canon and curriculum whose literary merit and moral probity remain so regularly and passionately contested? We’re not speaking of books like “Huckleberry Finn,” mired in a confused, deathless debate about racist language and censorship. Why doesn’t it irritate me more? Perhaps it’s because the book occupies such a peculiar place in the culture. The literary term for this profusion of interpretations borne out of a novel’s wide influence and deep purchase on the imagination is insane glut. (Apparently she becomes LBJ’s confidante in Carson’s work and honestly, why not at this point?) All this atop a heap of Fitzgeraldiana, new biographies and scholarship - to say nothing of the humming cottage industry dedicated to Zelda Fitzgerald, newly resurrected as a feminist heroine. Even the most minor characters have had spinoffs - Pammie, age 3 in Fitzgerald’s book, has her own story told in “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter,” by Tom Carson.
The novel has been transplanted to post-9/11 Manhattan in Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” to 21st-century London (our bootlegger becomes a Russian arms-dealing billionaire) in Vesna Goldsworthy’s “Gorsky,” to the home of a Black family in contemporary North Carolina in Stephanie Powell Watts’s “No One Is Coming to Save Us.” Gatsby has inspired immersive theater, young adult novels, a Taylor Swift song - “Happiness,” on her latest record, weaves together lines and images from the novel. That month also brings a prequel, “Nick,” by Michael Farris Smith.Īll this follows several films, theater adaptations and other retellings. January will see the publication of a new edition from Modern Library, with an introduction by Wesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York Times, and another from Penguin, introduced by the novelist Min Jin Lee. This revival will only get more crowded when the novel’s copyright expires as the calendar turns to 2021. In the century or so since “The Great Gatsby” was published, we have been lost in Gatsby’s house, immured in a never-ending revival. When we first meet him, he has wandered into the library and doesn’t seem able to escape - he stands paralyzed, staring at the books in inebriated admiration. Take Owl Eyes (or so he’s called, for his large spectacles), one of the many partygoers at Gatsby’s mansion. Few can write a more vivid neighbor, train conductor or, more usually, bartender. Scott Fitzgerald excelled at this sort of character. Sometimes just a silhouette - created with a few slashes of the pen, a few charismatic adjectives - seems the more unlikely accomplishment, born out of some surplus wit and energy, some surfeit of love for a fictional world that expresses itself in the desire to animate even its most minor participants.į. I’ve long held to the completely unsupported notion that a protagonist is simpler to write than a truly memorable supporting character.