The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

BBC’s Big Read #43

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“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

An episode of NYT’s The Daily inspired me to reread this for the first time since being required to in high school.

Back in the yesteryear of compulsory reading lists, The Great Gatsby was my second most fervently despised book in the lineup—trumped only by the drudging bore of The Good Earth. The only things I appreciated about Gatsby were its brevity and readability. (Incidentally, these were also the only reasons I found The Great Gatsby to be a slight improvement over The Good Earth.) In part, my contempt came from my literature teacher’s overzealous praise. It seemed he could hardly go five minutes without reminding us that it was his favorite novel, and he constantly lauded Fitzgerald as the greatest writer to grace humanity with his existence. Maybe I was bound to form an adverse opinion of what I felt was an exuberant teacher’s hyperbolic acclaim. However, my distaste was more complicated than teenage contrarianism. I think Kathryn Schulz summed it up best in her essay “Why I Despise The Great Gatsby”:

“The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book… But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.

Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else—love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, ‘I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.’”

It’s difficult to get through a book when you can’t sympathize with a single character, and I agree with Schulz that everyone in Gatsby is contemptible and affected. As a teenager, I loathed everything about everyone in this story (including our do-nothing narrator Nick), but during this reread, that loathing turned to indifference. I didn’t root for or side with anyone; I couldn’t even find it in myself to care what graves they each dug for themselves. The hope and love meant to embody Jay Gatsby do nothing to redeem his character for me. His artifice smothered any positive qualities he possessed. Neither idealism nor idolization (wearing the mask of love) helps Gatsby or anyone else in the end. Perhaps that is an accurate representation of the corruption, inaccessibility, and broken promises of the American Dream, but I don’t have to be any more enthusiastic reading it in fiction than I am with seeing it in reality.

No one tell my aforementioned lit teacher, but I gained a better appreciation of this novel’s brilliant (albeit still-overrated) writing after reading it as an adult. Life outside the confines of grade school education has also given me a greater understanding of the major themes: the elusive ideal of the American Dream; the cruel realities of classicism and entitled apathy of privilege; and the reckless romanticism and reverence of an unattainable lifestyle. I’m still not a fan of The Great Gatsby, but I’m afraid I find it too relatable to hate the same way I once did.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.