The Great Gatsby (1925)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."--The Great Gatsby

This is a novel I find myself going back to every so often. I first read it at fifteen. I had seen the film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, respectively, two one-time sweethearts from the time of World War One who are reunited briefly and not coincidentally seven years or so later in an affluent part of the suburbs of New York City, along the green glades and postcard-pretty little private harbors and estates of Long Island.

The movie was okay. I didn't understand the hullaballo about it actually. Then I read the book on my own. It was like a light going on in my head. I could imagine how great the movie SHOULD have been but somehow wasn't.

Jay Gatsby is a war hero, a newly-rich provocative shadow of the Long Island party set, and an apparent shady background as to how he acquired his money. (I love how Fitzgerald slowly brings the reader details of the the real Jay Gatsby and slowly dis-spells the various legends about him that the guests at his lavish parties have of him.) Only one man gets to know the real man--Nick Carroway, the narrator of the book. At the end of Gatsby's life, he is also Jay's only friend.
Jay Gatz (his real last name) is trying to get back the one thing that money and medals and social popularity can't buy for him--the love of Daisy. She is married to the more patrician Tom Buchanan, a polo-playing former college football hero with decidedly backward views on race and snobbish views of social position. He is also a violent cad of the first water,and his own mistress is just a doormat to him, or she better behave that way if she knows what's good for her.
By the end of the book it is clear that Daisy has fallen in love again with Gatsby, who has bought an estate near hers and gives lavish parties for the sole reason perhaps of attracting her away from Tom and into his life. But is Daisy really in love enough to leave Tom for Jay? She says she is at one point in the novel, but I wonder...

In between Jay and Daisy--besides Tom--is Nick, a Middle Westerner (like Fitzgerald himself) who is Daisy's cousin and the one person who Gatsby trusts to arrange a private tea with her at Nick's bungalow. (Nick is no millionaire--he's a bond salesman on Wall Street in the heady pre-Depression stock market.)

Many critics have commented on the "tragedy" of Jay Gatsby. I'm not sure he really is a tragic character, but he is a romantic. I think this self-made man truly believes he can reassemble his past and get a second chance with the person he believes is his soul-mate. What he can't see---and what rereading this novel again recently shows to me, is that he is chasing after a mirage, a idealized view of his beloved that Daisy--or perhaps no woman--could ever hope to sustain as a real flesh-and-blood human being. There is a short passage where Nick sums it up:

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion."



Scott Fitzgerald knew something about creative passions, and his own life took some near-tragic twists with alcohol, professional failure and his wife's madnes. But he was a great writer, and he proves it in his early short stories and in this novel. His dialogue here and in other works is always some of the best I've ever read. Those who have read this short novel even once probably already know that. It's one novel I'd take with me to a desert island. Perhaps you too have a similar feeling about a novel or a collected group of stories you'd like to share.