This book is one that barely needs an introduction. F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest novel, arguably modern America's defining novel, the cornerstone of 20th century literature, and surprisingly short enough to read in a single uneventful day when you're halfway through moving house and all your books are in boxes and so you borrow one from your brother's shelf. I had read it before too, in a week's-worth of bus journeys back in my sixth-form days, so this was a good re-reading. Well yeh, I've finished moving, and now have a pleasant summer of reading, travel, sun and squalour ahead of me. Anyway, sorry old sport, to Gatsby.
The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, an honest polite uninteresting fellow who's trying to self-educate his way into a successful career in finance. He moves into up-and-coming residential area West Egg, nearby to his acquaintances Tom (from college) and Daisy (by distant relation) Buchanan. Nick has led a sheltered youth and is taken rather aback when Tom introduces him to the wild side of New York's roaring 1920's nightlife, but even more taken aback when the opulent house next-door to his own seems to throw enormous parties every single night of the long summer. There is food and drink dished out to luxurious excess, hundreds of half-famous glamourous guests clad in richest garments, live jazz and swing bands, a pool, a beach, the enormous house and grounds to explore (it has a library full of "real books!"), and a lonesome host who bears the full cost and only mingles lightly before slinking off to stare mournfully across the bay. This host is Jay Gatsby, a man of incredible wealth and ostentation, with dozens of friends in high places, a rather shady past making him the subject of various rumours, and a singular obsession with a woman from his past, who turns out to be SPOILER ALERT Daisy. Gatsby, charming and obscenely materially well-off as he is, coerces Nick into arranging a meeting between him (Nick's new neighbour) and Daisy (Nick's new neighbour's lover-of-five-years-previously) to see if the obsession is mutual. This sets in motion predictable conflicts between Gatsby and Daisy and Daisy's husband Tom and to a lesser extent Tom's mistress Myrtle and Myrtle's husband Wilson - and Nick Carraway and his somehow-acquired golf-champion ladyfriend Jordan Baker watch and panic and feel increasingly awkward on the sidelines. Spoiler-free events ensue which destroy several lives.
Fitzgerald's work has at its core a critique of the American Dream and the superficial carelessness that had become of it. It's a perfectly refined indictment of the ironies of social and material greed; a dissection of the purest sheerest heights of love and wealth and diagnosing a deep-seated discontentment even within those. (If you don't mind a couple extra spoilers, John Green says some excellent things about it here.) These observations are not only made poignant by events in the novel, but are fragments of wisdom that we cannot hear too often, as in the contemporary West our actual attitudes have changed little since the days of the exciting lavish 1920's. We still hold central to our intentions and behaviours the possibility and desirability of gaining not only as much as we want, but exactly what we want - be that in terms of material goods, social prestige, comfortable lifestyles, knowledge, pleasurable experiences, power, even relationships. And this is dangerous. No matter how much of the world we accrue we can never control it completely; regardless of our status we will not become promoted to godship over the world to any extent. This was Gatsby's mistake, to a dramatic extreme, but we make this mistake persistently in our behaviours and worldviews. In the novel, everyone's partying all the time, throwing around immense amounts of money, rubbing shoulders with many other people embroiled in the depths of leisure, and nobody's happy! There are a handful of rare moments where circumstance bring someone to briefly enjoy themselves, but there is not a contented character to be found in the book. Let us not make the same mistakes against which Fitzgerald warns. As a christian, I know of one particularly assured source of contentment, but surely non-believers too can see the tragedy of living as Gatsby does. Live life not as you want but as you can, finding contentment in your present rather than a future to strive toward or a past to regain - progress is good when it comes along but don't skew everything off-kilter for a shot at it. Anyhow, old sport, I'll cut off there before I turn this book-blog-post into a full-blown pseudo-wisdom-self-help-thing.
It's a superb work, and its damning metaphors ringing into our culture definitely make it one of those "yes do read it" type of books. If you've not read it, do so, thoughtfully. If you have, consider doing so again, more thoughtfully. At all costs shun the film - take awesome literary insight above Leonardo di Caprio any day (no offence to you, Leo - you will get your Oscar some day).
