The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Author’s website
Not sure how I missed reading this classic in high school, but I must have, because I remember nothing about it. It’s pretty common fare for high school literature classes, and I think my kids have all read it.
Here’s the Amazon description of the book:
“In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write “something new–something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.” That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald’s finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning–” Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It’s also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means–and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel’s more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy’s patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.”
What a great story it is though. It reminded me of how “cheap†words have become in these days when we can all crank out so many of them on a keyboard at 100+ WPM. I’m as guilty as anyone else. As someone trying to build a living as a writer, it’s quite critical for me to get lots of “stuff†out there in the market. To publish lots of blog postings, and do lots of guest posts, and send out many emails.
But in the end, the written word suffers. In Fitzgerald’s writing, you can feel the depth of the prose, and understand clearly the care that went into the construction of each sentence. It was really a rich reading experience, and made me realize how “cheap†words have become today, and how rare it is to read something with the sort of richness you can find in an author from this era like Fitzgerald.
As enjoyable to me as the richness of the prose was the depth of the characters he built. This is one I listened to as an audio book, and Tim Robbins was the actor who read it. I suspect that some of that character depth may have been the really excellent job that Robbins did, but even accounting for that, I really enjoyed the characters. Gatsby especially was a character whom I could see and feel deeply as the story moved around him.
A bonus of this audio version was a series of letters Fitzgerald wrote in the years as he was trying to get Gatsby published – letters to his publisher and others. I think I enjoyed listening to these letters almost as much as to the story.
I will say that had I read this book in high school, I don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it. My identification with and enjoyment of the characters could happen because life’s experiences have given me a deep pool from which to draw empathy, and my appreciation of the prose is enhanced in comparison to what I feel capable of as a writer.
Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors and biographies of he and his wife, Zelda, are fascinating reads. Their era, “The Roaring Twenties” was one of a kind. I’m sure I’ve glamorized their really rather tragic lives but I feel such a sense of understanding and love for both of the Fitzgeralds and for the characters who resemble them so much in Scott’s books. Zelda wrote stories and one novel, herself, and was really quite good.
After reading the book, I found myself looking at other works he wrote. I think I’d like to try another – do you have a favorite Marsha?
Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors and biographies of he and his wife, Zelda, are fascinating reads. Their era, “The Roaring Twenties” was one of a kind. I’m sure I’ve glamorized their really rather tragic lives but I feel such a sense of understanding and love for both of the Fitzgeralds and for the characters who resemble them so much in Scott’s books. Zelda wrote stories and one novel, herself, and was really quite good.
After reading the book, I found myself looking at other works he wrote. I think I’d like to try another – do you have a favorite Marsha?