The great American novel, apparently. I read GG many years ago and, while I remembered the bare bones of the story, I hadn't remembered much of the mechanics of the narrative.

The first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, lives on Long Island next door to millionaire Jay Gatsby and is invited to his many parties, not that one needs an invitation since most of the guests are gatecrashers. At the parties, one of the favourite topics of conversation is the host, a mystery man who seems to have risen from nothing. Some people say that he killed a man, and others that he is a bootlegger, and others that he went to Oxford University. One of the themes of this novel is the gradual discovery of the real Jay Gatsby.

Coincidentally, Nick's cousin Daisy is the woman Gatsby loved before being sent abroad to fight in the First World War. Daisy's polo-playing husband Tom is having an affair with Myrtle, the wife of a garage mechanic called Mr Wilson. These tangled relationship have tragic consequences.

The book is set in the Jazz Age, between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash, when prohibition made alcoholic liquor illegal and gangsters rich, when a clever man with no scruples could make his fortune overnight, and when bright young things would party and make love all night and damn the consequences. The contrast between the lawns of the Gatsby mansion and the ash-covered streets surrounding the garage of the mechanic couldn't be greater.

It seems ironic that a book which is trying to peel away the superficialities to find the naked truth about the little people that we are, each one of us, should be remembered for the glitter and the sparkle of the hedonistic parties it describes.

Another irony is that a 'great American novel' should puncture the American dream of opportunity for all. Despite his huge wealth, despite being the ultimate in that American meme 'the self-made man', Gatsby is still not accepted by the hedonists that make up Long Island's social elite.

It's a short but carefully paced novel. The first party that the narrator attends is exactly 25% of the way through. At the 50% mark, the narrator sets up the reunion tryst between Gatsby and Daisy. The car crash that ushers in the final act comes just after the 75% mark.

On 27th May 2023 I attended a performance of The Great Gatsby staged as a radio play from the 1940s (complete with spoof adverts) and produced by the company at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne. The least successful part of this was when the actor playing the narrator, Nick Carraway, needed to read out long paragraphs of scene-setting. This made me realise how much narration there was in the book. It was also clear how many epigrams there were: they couldn't be cut!

Is Nick Carraway gay?

At the end of Chapter Two, a confessedly drunk Carraway leaves Tom and Myrtle's rather awful party with a Mr McKee, described earlier as "a pale, feminine man", who lives in the flat below; Mr McKee's wife stays at the party. Mr McKee is told off by the elevator boy: "Keep your hands off the lever". Then there is an ellipsis immediately before "I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear" There is no explanation for this moment. One presumes a homosexual encounter, although I can find no reason why this should be in the book. Sarah Churchill, writing in The Guardian, suggests that the novel's power comes from moments such as this when "we must learn to read between the lines"

Why is this novel regarded as 'great'?

Literary historian Jeff Nilsson writing in USA today suggests that the greatness of the book lies in its language which he describes as "pitch-perfect". William Cain, writing in BBC Culture, agrees: "Ironically, given that this is a novel of illusion and delusion, in which surfaces are crucial, we all too often overlook the texture of its prose." It is clear that Fitzgerald crafted his sentences with great care, but this distracted from my enjoyment of the novel. I felt that Fitzgerald couldn't bear to cut a great epigram, such as "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired." (Ch 4). Neat but it doesn't fit and when the reader encounters it they are jarred out of the story. An even worse moment came when Nick the narrator realises mid-way through the day that today is his thirtieth birthday. This is silly enough already but it only seems to be there so that he can think, portentously and pompously: "Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade." (Ch 7) Even the famous ending ("So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."; Ch 9) feels as if he's trying too hard.

Deseret suggests that the power of the novel lies in its metaphors ... but these are scarcely subtle. The lower class characters live along the railroad track in between hedonistic Long Island and the booming New York City in the ashy wastelands of industrial America. Overseeing, literally, this desert is an advertisement for an oculist which consists of a monstrous pair of eyes overlooking the desolation; the symbolism of the all-seeing eye of God (and perhaps a reference to the eye atop the pyramid on the dollar bill) is blatant. Gatsby's mansion is positioned so that he can look across the bay at the jetty for Daisy's house ... where there is a green light.

Perhaps its simplicity is its secret. Kenneth Eble (1974 The Great Gatsby in College Literature 1.1.34 - 37) suggests that GG can claim to be the Great American Novel because it is efficiently told and therefore short enough for Americans to read, and because it isn't over-nuanced. I wonder if there are any other literary cultures out there for which 'short and simple' is the criterion for greatness. On this page I consider other contenders for the title of The Great American Novel.

Selected quotes:

"That most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man'." (Ch 1)
"Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas." (Ch 1)
"ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." (Ch 2)
"When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms." (Ch 2)
"There were whispers about him from those who had found little to whisper about in this world." (Ch 3)
"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance about it ... It faced ... the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wished to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." (Ch 3)
"I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." (Ch 3( says the narrator. But is he? Really?
"Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilisation." (Ch 7)
"Her voice is full of money" (Ch 7)
"His eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears." (Ch 9)
"He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor." (Ch 9)
"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Ch 9)
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ..." (Ch 9)

The GG mentions "the secret of Castle Rackrent" a novel by Maria Edgeworth and compares Gatsby to Trimalchio, the thrower of lavish dinner parties in Satyricon by Petronius.

Other books by Fitzgerald that are reviewed in this blog include:

May 2023; 188 pages

The GG was rated 51st by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and also listed by Time magazine as on the the 100 best novels since Time began (1923).