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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Apr. 10th, 2013 09:43 amLike all right-thinking people I've reread this book in anticipation of the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation that's coming out this year. I'm pretty sure I've read it twice before, but it has never made any lasting impression on me, perhaps because the copy I have (bought used in college) is randomly marked with inane underlinings and marginal notes. Or maybe I always get confused by the non-linear way that Fitzgerald tells the story, weaving back and forth in time to create a portrait of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan that never seems to add up to anything for me.
I suppose the fascination of Gatsby is that he's that great American type: a con man. A pretender. Like Alien in Spring Breakers he's a kind of gangster who dragged himself up from nowhere by his bootstraps and is living the American Dream. But that's almost by-the-way to the novel, revealed in inert flashbacks that don't have much drama, while what sizzles and pops is the fantasy life he creates in his Long Island mansion and in his dream of love with Daisy. Yet I think a problem I have with the novel is that Daisy herself is such an elusive, uninteresting character.
What's Daisy's story? She's a society girl from old money who has a fling with a young soldier before he leaves for war and then loses interest in him after he's gone. She marries somebody from a moneyed family, has a child with him, and lives an empty life of hedonism. When her old flame re-appears, newly enriched by bootlegging, she flirts with abandoning her boredom (and cheating husband) but then chooses stability and boredom over an unreal dream of romantic happiness.
Well, that's a real enough story, but it's mostly told from the point of view of Nick (the narrator) and Gatsby, and Daisy's allure never really comes alive for me. She just seems a vapid parasite, which is pretty much the way Nick seems to see her. What bite the novel has is in its view (which is Nick's) of Tom and Daisy as adulterers and murderers who get away with it because of wealth and social status. The point is that the American Dream of making a ton of money and living on Easy Street is an illusion, because what matters is not money but social class. I suppose that Gatsby's ultra-romanticism when it comes to Daisy is meant to seem delusional and pathetic and ultimately self-destructive.
Now that I think of it, Gatsby's delusions of romance are contrasted by Nick's own cynicism about his affection for the tennis star, Jordan. Are we supposed to admire Nick? Nick comes from money, but he's trying to work his own way in the world by starting out at a brokerage firm far from home, albeit bankrolled for the first year by his father. He is fleeing a relationship with a girl in the Midwest that everybody had assumed was going to turn into a marriage. He has feelings for Jordan, but he also knows that she's no different than Daisy. Ultimately he rejects the unworthy woman, unlike Gatsby, although he feels torn about it. At the end of the novel he returns to the quiet life of the Midwest, but has he given up on love entirely? Is he in fact incapable of love?
Perhaps my real problem with the book is that Nick is such a cypher himself. What's *his* story?
I think I've also had a hard time connecting to the romanticism (and anti-romanticism) of this book, but it looks like prime territory for Baz Luhrmann to play with. If anybody can sell Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy as something epic and tragic, Baz can. He should also do well with the desperate fun that the parasite class use to distract themselves from their moral vacuity. We'll see how well he captures the criminal tawdriness that underlies all the sparkle.
One interesting thing I noticed for the first time this time is Tom Buchanan's racism. He's basically a paranoid white supremacist of the grand old American type, and his racism is portrayed as something lunatic and hypocritical. Tom is clearly shown to project his own moral failings onto what he considers the lower races. Not that the novel is very concerned with race in general, but Fitzgerald at least seems to disapprove of racism at a time when segregation was still the law of the land.
I suppose the fascination of Gatsby is that he's that great American type: a con man. A pretender. Like Alien in Spring Breakers he's a kind of gangster who dragged himself up from nowhere by his bootstraps and is living the American Dream. But that's almost by-the-way to the novel, revealed in inert flashbacks that don't have much drama, while what sizzles and pops is the fantasy life he creates in his Long Island mansion and in his dream of love with Daisy. Yet I think a problem I have with the novel is that Daisy herself is such an elusive, uninteresting character.
What's Daisy's story? She's a society girl from old money who has a fling with a young soldier before he leaves for war and then loses interest in him after he's gone. She marries somebody from a moneyed family, has a child with him, and lives an empty life of hedonism. When her old flame re-appears, newly enriched by bootlegging, she flirts with abandoning her boredom (and cheating husband) but then chooses stability and boredom over an unreal dream of romantic happiness.
Well, that's a real enough story, but it's mostly told from the point of view of Nick (the narrator) and Gatsby, and Daisy's allure never really comes alive for me. She just seems a vapid parasite, which is pretty much the way Nick seems to see her. What bite the novel has is in its view (which is Nick's) of Tom and Daisy as adulterers and murderers who get away with it because of wealth and social status. The point is that the American Dream of making a ton of money and living on Easy Street is an illusion, because what matters is not money but social class. I suppose that Gatsby's ultra-romanticism when it comes to Daisy is meant to seem delusional and pathetic and ultimately self-destructive.
Now that I think of it, Gatsby's delusions of romance are contrasted by Nick's own cynicism about his affection for the tennis star, Jordan. Are we supposed to admire Nick? Nick comes from money, but he's trying to work his own way in the world by starting out at a brokerage firm far from home, albeit bankrolled for the first year by his father. He is fleeing a relationship with a girl in the Midwest that everybody had assumed was going to turn into a marriage. He has feelings for Jordan, but he also knows that she's no different than Daisy. Ultimately he rejects the unworthy woman, unlike Gatsby, although he feels torn about it. At the end of the novel he returns to the quiet life of the Midwest, but has he given up on love entirely? Is he in fact incapable of love?
Perhaps my real problem with the book is that Nick is such a cypher himself. What's *his* story?
I think I've also had a hard time connecting to the romanticism (and anti-romanticism) of this book, but it looks like prime territory for Baz Luhrmann to play with. If anybody can sell Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy as something epic and tragic, Baz can. He should also do well with the desperate fun that the parasite class use to distract themselves from their moral vacuity. We'll see how well he captures the criminal tawdriness that underlies all the sparkle.
One interesting thing I noticed for the first time this time is Tom Buchanan's racism. He's basically a paranoid white supremacist of the grand old American type, and his racism is portrayed as something lunatic and hypocritical. Tom is clearly shown to project his own moral failings onto what he considers the lower races. Not that the novel is very concerned with race in general, but Fitzgerald at least seems to disapprove of racism at a time when segregation was still the law of the land.
