Better Know a Classic: The Great Gatsby

Every couple of years, I reread The Great Gatsby. It's my favorite book, but that's not really why I keep picking it up--I've had plenty of favorites over the years that I don't really turn back to, for fear that they won't hold up. (I've been avoiding the Memoirs of a Geisha reread for pretty much that reason.) But I know that Gatsby will. And it never disappoints--it's still as close to a perfect novel as I've ever read.

I didn't always feel that way. The first time I read it, in an "eh, it's a classic and I should do it" fit of self-improvement in high school, I wasn't enamored. But then it was taught in one of the craziest lit classes I ever took in college (American Lit with a certifiable professor), something clicked, and I fell in love. (That's kind of how I roll; it's always the second glance that gets me.) And each time I read it, I notice something different--a turn of phrase that sparkles, a subtlety of character, or some random little moment that never jumped out at me before.

I think the narrator, Nick Carraway, has benefited the most from these multiple looks. First I thought he was too reticent; then I thought he was using the Daisy-Gatsby drama to cover up his own latent crush on Gatsby; and eventually I just decided he was unreliable. But I don't think so anymore. Maybe it's because he's 30 and I'm pushing it as well, but now I think he just kind of patches things together as best he can, as the only sane person on Long Island. He's very efficient, that Nick. He keeps everything moving along at a good clip, hustling through back stories that would have been fifty pages of exposition in another author's book (cough*Faulkner*cough).

I also feel more lenient toward Daisy these days. She's still a jerk, don't get me wrong--having a voice "full of money" doesn't excuse pitting men against one another for sport, or mowing down your husband's mistress--but I don't think she's malicious. She's bored and unhappy and desperate, with childlike comprehension of consequences. And without actual stuff to do (how did people entertain themselves in 1925 when gin wasn't handy?), it's easier to see how and why she lets things get so far out of hand, so fast. There's also the fact that everyone's pretty much egging her on, something I never really noticed before. No one (even Nick, with his constant disapproval) really stops to say, "Hmm, maybe you shouldn't cheat on your husband with the rich guy with the crazy eyes."

And I think the part that amazes me most is how wall-to-wall good the writing is. Nearly every sentence is airtight and eloquent. There's no questionable extravagance in a book that's all about questionable extravagance. So this book is as much a triumph of editing (both Fitzgerald's and, presumably, Maxwell Perkins's) as it is of the writing. (And having dealt now with some...colorful authors myself as an editor, I appreciate the wrangling it must have taken to get Fitzgerald to turn in anything on time and in decent shape.)

All in all, very happy with the biennial visit to West Egg.

Some of my favorite parts, this round:

"The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

"She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."