"It was all very careless and confused. 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."
A friend of mine gave me this book as an early Christmas gift and I will freely admit that this is not a work of literature that I had ever in the past been drawn to. Period pieces have in my mind a kind of nebulous, random format of storytelling and in reading them, on occasion, I ask myself "What is going on and why is this even happening?" or "What is the point, anyway?" These sort of books seem to be more like real life than fits my particular tastes in the way that real life is full of events and happenstances that seem never to connect with each other, forming a lesson, a parable, a goal or a whole image at which to stand back and say that this story was about this or this story was about that.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had done myself a great evil in keeping from reading the Great Gatsby for so long. Everything I usually dislike in realistic, historical fiction was nowhere to be found in the elegant, articulate though sometimes cumbersome English of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I found myself reading all the quicker as the pages neared their end.
The Great Gatsby bears a title that is never fully explained in its pages. Is Jay Gatsby truly a great man? Or is he merely a deceptive, conniving adulterer? The story finds him as a wealth Long Islander in the early 1900s consumed with passion for Daisy, now Mrs. Daisy Buchanan, who he attempts to woo away from her husband under the memorial that they had loved each other prior to her marriage to Tom. And we find that all of Gatsby's existence: his frivolous parties, his magnificent mansion, his indulgent lifestyle generated by bootlegging, is merely a front, a handsomely painted wall of cardboard, to win the heart of this married woman back to himself.
If you've read the book, I would like to ask what you thought about the character of Gatsby, whether you liked him as a person or not. He is an incredible, complex character that elicits sympathy and empathy on one page and then on the very next provokes your dislike and disapproval. I mean, here is a man who is wealthy, ah but wealth that is ill-gotten gain, a man who bided his time for years to meet the woman he loved, ah but she is married now, a man who has put up such an impenetrable façade that the narrator, Nick Carraway, who becomes his sole closest ally, is never called by his first name by Gatsby at all. Jay Gatsby chooses rather to the very end to address Nick as "old sport", his go-to moniker for everyone apparently, a habit which he didn't even originate himself.
What I came away with most strongly was the way Fitzgerald turns the American dream on its head and shows the dissatisfaction of that great promise: here, there are several characters who have too much and yet their burning anxiety for more simply wants more, more of Daisy for Gatsby, more of his mistress for Tom. I should like to go back and re-read the whole thing with this final thought in mind, the words of Nick Carraway on the final page:
"And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor's eyes---a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
"And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."
The best stories are insights into human nature and this book is great because of Fitzgerald's bold examination of the falsity of the American dream, the exposure of the self-destructive tendency of human greed, really the concept that in struggling to get to the top we can find that there is no satisfactory "top" at all and that in reaching for the wind, we find that we cannot close our fists around it. I loved the Great Gatsby for its gorgeous use of the English language---I lament that it seems like a totally alien language today---and for crafting a character with immense psychological complexity. My complaint of Gatsby would be that I wish it had been a little longer. I felt as if I had reached the middle of the story when I realized I was already reading the climax. The earliest parts of the book---I'm looking at you, Chapter 4---can be a little tedious, but perseverance is rewarded by exciting character interaction when the story gets on with itself, establishing its characters and their personalities and then throwing them all into the mix.
Another admission: I've never read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald before this book. Remember my earlier admission. With Gatsby a notch of my belt, I think I've a better palate to suit his other writings, now.
Just don't ever see the recent DiCaprio movie, unless you like the jarring contrast of Jay-Z and the 1920s....
-norton
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