This month I ordered a copy of "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to read along with Crazy Aunt Purl. I finished it in a couple of days (it's only 180 pages) and ... can I just say I am NOT anxiously waiting for the new movie adaptation?
I suppose I must have read Gatsby before; either in high school, although on second look it isn't really YA material, is it? - or in college. But if so, it didn't stay with me.
And now it is quite clear why. I have always most enjoyed stories with elements of adventure, and nothing happens in this novella. It is simply a brief, unpleasant story about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. The only character with an iota of actual character is the narrator Nick, and he presents as so unrespectably passive that I just wanted to kick him, too. He's an unsophisticated, go-along guy - and I don't buy it, given that a) he's a Yale grad; b) he's a veteran of the Great War; c) he's his family's 'rebel'; and d) he introduces himself as a bit of a student of human nature - an introduction that does not bear up under examination.
Gatsby is always referred to as "a great novel of the Jazz Age." It ain't. It's well written, but barely a novel, and it's not about the Jazz Age; it's about what happens when a small-town guy goes to the big city to make his fortune, falls in with a bad crowd, and escapes relatively unscathed - having learned, apparently, nothing. His one act of volition is going to New York. His one good act is attending to Gatsby's funeral. FEH.
The book is almost redeemed by passages like this: "...I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality ... Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon ... ." That's Nick's self-introduction, and it sets you up for an interesting character study, doesn't it?
But that's not what we get. We get a very straightforward narrative of what Nick observes, and participates in, without ever learning a single additional thing about him or, really, about the other people in the story. There are wit and self-awareness in this introduction, but only there.
And then this: "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it ... concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." That's Nick on Gatsby.
That one passage sets up the supposed charm of Gatsby, and is apparently meant to explain how a Midwestern con man and criminal briefly and mendaciously makes a splash in East Coast society. You can't do it without charm. But nowhere else in the story is Gatsby charming, and because all of his much more potentially interesting back story is told by Nick in a sort of "I found out later" summary, all we are left with is Gatsby behaving in a way that is so self-destructively stupid that it makes his previous success (however dishonestly achieved) unbelievable. No one that dumb and delusional could have done what he supposedly did. Again ... FEH.
And I'm not going to waste time on the allegedly irresistible Daisy, who is - to this reader, anyway - weak, selfish, brainless, and careless to the point of viciousness. All of the women in the story, in fact, are what the musical "Chicago" (now THERE'S a great story of the Jazz Age!) describes pungently as ... twats.
Rumor has it that Leo DiCaprio is up for the part of Gatsby. No doubt he can bring to it his own considerable charm (remember Catch Me if You Can?) but the charm certainly isn't on the page. Ultimately, my favorite thing about this "classic"? The fact that it was done with so fast.
