The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

Gossip around him gets quite tense:

“You look at him sometime when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The beautiful woman as an unattainable center of attention was a common Jazz Age trope, reflected in the story of The Great Gatsby. Above, Lilyan Tashman attracts men like flies in the 1926 film So This Is Paris.
Image from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/it-girls-of-the-jazz-age

In time Nick develops an appreciation of Gatsby, to whom he exclaims late in the book: “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” This earns Nick a last, enigmatic smile, further baiting him and the reader to untangle the mystery of who Gatsby really is.

And who is he? We really don’t get to know. Like the movie Citizen Kane, this is a journey of discovery where the actual discovery proves anticlimactic. In Kane the solution centers on a sled. Here it is a green light across Long Island Sound, a “Hopalong Cassidy” book, and a guy who wears a suit buttoned with human molars. The pieces don’t quite fit, but in the end we feel like we know the man, somehow.

Gatsby is a gust of irrational exuberance, always in motion: “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” But this mentality was at odds with Fitzgerald’s own, a man who left us the famous quote: “There are no second acts in American lives.” Gatsby’s desire to win Daisy, his great love before the Great War, blinds him to any limitations and dooms him to final failure. Yet Nick Carraway sees something noble in the endeavor. Readers will, too. Gatsby wants Nick to like him; ultimately that seems to be what makes him likeable.

The setting of The Great Gatsby follows the rough dimensions of greater New York City, with West Egg, where Nick and Gatsby live, corresponding with Great Neck on Long Island. To the east is East Egg (Manhasset Neck), where Daisy and her green light are.
Map by Buttercrumble from https://www.buttercrumble.com/great-gatsby.

The irony of Fitzgerald’s dismissal of second acts is that Gatsby would prove it wrong in the way it has become famous today. In its own time, The Great Gatsby was the flop that defined Fitzgerald’s descent as a writer, managing to sell just a few thousand books in its first 15-plus years of existence. Then, after Fitzgerald died, the book took off.

In its own time, The Great Gatsby was compared unfavorably to Fitzgerald’s first two novels, both bestsellers: This Side Of Paradise and The Beautiful And Damned. Both are ponderous morality tales filled with overheated declarations about life’s meaning and the falsities of romantic love, especially when practiced by alluring debutantes.

Neither is a bad book, but both are disappointing even compared to the short stories Fitzgerald put out at the same time. You feel the promising young author preening, writing too much trying to say everything.

The Great Gatsby says what it has to say in something under 200 pages. It too is written around a romance, but this time Fitzgerald’s focus is sharper. His target is the American dream; he uses humor, suspense, and lush descriptions of splendiferous estates to make his points about people who live and dream beyond their means.

A living room in the Hamptons section of Long Island, roughly equivalent to the novel's East Egg. A visiting partier is dumbstruck that the books on Gatsby's shelves are actually real ones with pages, not blocks of dummy bindings.
Image from https://www.6sqft.com/hamptons-estate-that-was-f-scott-fitzgeralds-inspiration-for-the-great-gatsby-asks-17m/

When Gatsby explains what it is about Daisy that attracts him, the answer cuts across every layer of the novel:

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

The Great Gatsby is all about money, the wanting and the getting of it. It’s the American dream that draws from Fitzgerald both scathing rebuke and panting desire.

Fitzgerald was politically socialist; in his short story “May Day,” published five years before, his sympathies are brought into sharp focus when jingoistic Americans attack the offices of a radical newspaper. In The Great Gatsby the cruelty of capitalism comes up multiple times, in the brutish manner of Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan, the ways we discover Gatsby has made his money, in the fate of a sad-eyed puppy Tom’s mistress adopts for a lark.

Jazz music is prominently featured in The Great Gatsby, including lyrical quotations from popular songs like "Ain't We Got Fun" and "The Sheik Of Araby." "By seven o'clock the orchestra arrived...no thin five-piece affair but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and high and low drums..."
Image from https://homesteadmuseum.blog/2016/09/28/ticket-to-the-twenties-themes-jazz-or-not-in-los-angeles-and-beyond/

Fitzgerald sums up the toll at the end:

It was all very careless and confused. 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…

Fitzgerald also has at the rich in other ways. At one point Nick as narrator runs down the guest list at Gatsby’s mansion:

Clarence Endive was from East Egg as I remember….From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells…

He keeps running off inane names with rising ridiculosity for two full pages, ticking off their foibles and family connections.

The frivolity of this smart set is called out throughout the book, with emphasis on the waste they leave behind. Nick describes the ruins of pulped orange hulls littering the Gatsby lawn, while the constant drinking seems to license crude and dangerous misbehavior.

Yet the beauty of this upper-crust existence is also rhapsodized many times, Fitzgerald’s clipped prose gliding us across lawns and through marbled passageways in a way that is hard not to appreciate:

Our eyes lifted over the rosebuds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Above lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby in a 2013 film adaptation, probably the most culturally successful cinematic treatment of Fitzgerald's novel. It definitely leans on the swankier side, but then so did the novel. By way of contrast, the Robert Redford 1974 adaptation seems painfully sedate.
Image from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-great-gatsby-2013

Yes, the twisted majesty of what we recall today as the Jazz Age is put out in full, disapproving view. Yet Fitzgerald insists on a sense of class for his main character. Gatsby is impossible to hate.

We watch him latch on to Nick, and as Nick is our narrator, it is like the guy is turning his charm on us. His adulterous affection for Daisy could make him unlikeable, yet instead it makes him human. Fitzgerald isn’t above slapstick as Gatsby becomes sheepish at the sight of Daisy; there is a bit of Harold Lloyd in his sudden, comic losses of composure.

It is more likely a reader will come away disliking Daisy, who embodies the false values and meretricious behavior of her class. She was apparently based on Ginevra King, whose wealthy stockbroker father forbade Fitzgerald to court his daughter on the basis of being too poor. More ammo for perceiving an anti-capitalist message, no doubt, whether or not she deserved it.

Capitalism’s critics often claim it to be legalized theft; certainly the cast of The Great Gatsby suggests wholesale chicanery afoot. 

Jordan Baker, an amateur golfer and friend of Daisy, becomes involved with Nick as the book progresses. At one point we are told Jordan got into a minor scandal when she was caught improving her lie in a match, but it is clear she suffered no serious loss of face from the episode.

Bootleg liquor in the days of Prohibition was not just a fact of life, but its own industry. In The Great Gatsby it is hinted Jay Gatsby's fortune is connected to the sale of illegal liquor tied to drug stores he owns. Yet Fitzgerald never exactly spells it all out.
Image from https://www.seventhreedistilling.com/seven-three-blog/bootleggers

Cheating is par for the course in the world of Gatsby. We know Gatsby does it, we see Tom and Daisy do it, even Nick’s bond business may not be entirely on the up and up.

The most famous cheater in the book is Meyer Wolfshiem, based on real-life underworld figure Arnold Rothstein and credited with the same crime Rothstein did commit, the fixing of the 1919 World Series:

The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

The Great Gatsby uses crime as a motif for the American way of life. As a social message, this is more pushed than developed. But as the spine of the plot, drawing us deeper into Gatsby’s web, it works fantastically. The thing that staggers me about Gatsby is how enjoyably it goes down, frothy as champagne with a kicky aftertaste.

The book distills Fitzgerald’s unique ability to play with ideas, draw upon real-life situations, dangle tangents and yet crushes you in the end with the simple tragedy of a broken-hearted man and his need to be loved.