Nearly a Century Later, We’re
Still Reading — and Changing
Our Minds About — Gatsby
By Parul Sehgal
NYT Dec. 30, 2020
I’ve long held to the completely
unsupported notion that a protagonist is
simpler to write than a truly memorable
supporting character. Sometimes just a
silhouette — created with a few slashes of
the pen, a few charismatic adjectives —
seems the more unlikely accomplishment,
born out of some surplus wit and energy,
some surfeit of love for a fictional world
that expresses itself in the desire to
animate even its most minor participants.
F. Scott Fitzgerald excelled at this sort of
character. Few can write a more vivid
neighbor, train conductor or, more
usually, bartender. Take Owl Eyes (or so
he’s called, for his large spectacles), one of
the many partygoers at Gatsby’s mansion.
When we first meet him, he has wandered
into the library and doesn’t seem able to
escape — he stands paralyzed, staring at
the books in inebriated admiration.
I wonder if we’re all Owl Eyes now. In the
century or so since “The Great Gatsby”
was published, we have been lost in
Gatsby’s house, immured in a never-
ending revival.
This revival will only get more crowded
when the novel’s copyright expires as the
calendar turns to 2021. January will see
the publication of a new edition from
Modern Library, with an introduction by
Wesley Morris, a critic at large at The New
York Times, and another from Penguin,
introduced by the novelist Min Jin Lee.
That month also brings a prequel, “Nick,”
by Michael Farris Smith.
All this atop a heap of Fitzgeraldiana, new
biographies and scholarship — to say
nothing of the humming cottage industry
dedicated to Zelda Fitzgerald, newly
resurrected as a feminist heroine.
The literary term for this profusion of
interpretations borne out of a novel’s wide
influence and deep purchase on the
imagination is insane glut.
Why doesn’t it irritate me more? Perhaps
it’s because the book occupies such a
peculiar place in the culture. Is there a
major novel so established in the canon
and curriculum whose literary merit and
moral probity remain so regularly and
passionately contested? We’re not
speaking of books like “Huckleberry Finn,”
mired in a confused, deathless debate
about racist language and censorship.
With “The Great Gatsby,” the question is
simpler and stranger: Can Fitzgerald
write? Is the book a masterpiece — what
T.S. Eliot called “the first step that
American fiction has taken since Henry
James” — or, as Gore Vidal put it, as Gore
Vidal would, the work of a writer who was
“barely literate”?
The novel has become subject to all its
own barbs; every one of Fitzgerald’s bitter
observations is lobbed back at his book in
turn. As Nick wonders of Gatsby, so
readers have wondered of the novel: Is this
shallowness I perceive, or miraculous
depth? Like Daisy, the book is derided as
pretty and meretricious. Like Nick, it is
accused of being passive, or worse —
complicit in the spectacle it appears to
criticize.
Even admirers have their own debates:
The book is good, but great?
Great — but not the greatness of assurance
and cut-gem perfection. It’s the greatness
of a vastly open, unstable, slithery text.
Within the scaffold of its tidy, three-act
structure and its carefully patterned
symmetries, sprouts an unruly blend of
stiff moralism and wild ambivalence, its
infatuation with and contempt for wealth,
its empathy alongside its desire to punish
its characters.
One of the pleasures of writing about a
book as widely read as “The Great Gatsby”
is jetting through the obligatory plot
summary. You recall Nick Carraway, our
narrator, who moves next door to the
mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby on Long
Island. Gatsby, it turns out, is pining for
Nick’s cousin, Daisy; his glittering life is a
lure to impress her, win her back. Daisy is
inconveniently married to the brutish Tom
Buchanan, who, in turn, is carrying on
with a married woman, the doomed
Myrtle. Cue the parties, the affairs, Nick
getting very queasy about it all. In a lurid
climax, Myrtle is run over by a car driven
by Daisy. Gatsby is blamed; Myrtle’s
husband shoots him dead in his pool and
kills himself. The Buchanans discreetly
leave town, their hands clean. Nick is
writing the book, we understand, two
years later, in a frenzy of disgust.
Fitzgerald was proud of what he had
achieved. “I think my novel is about the
best American novel ever written,” he
crowed. The book baffled reviewers,
however, and sold poorly. “Of all the
reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not
one had the slightest idea what the book
was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic
Edmund Wilson.
That matter remains unsettled. The book
has been treated as a beautiful bauble,
fundamentally unserious. In a 1984 essay
in The Times, John Kenneth Galbraith
sniffed that Fitzgerald was only
superficially interested in class. “It is the
lives of the rich — their enjoyments,
agonies and putative insanity — that
attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social
and political consequences escape him as
he himself escaped such matters in his
own life.”
This interpretation has been turned on its
head. Both new editions make light of the
book’s beauty — it’s the treatment of the
grotesque that is so compelling (Morris
compares the characters to the “Real
Housewives”). Both make the case that the
book’s value lies in its critique of
capitalism. Lee describes Fitzgerald as “a
fan of Karl Marx,” and writes that
“Gatsby” remains “a modern novel by
exploring the intersection of social
hierarchy, white femininity, white male
love and unfettered capitalism.” For
Morris, too, there is no romance between
Gatsby and Daisy but “capitalism as an
emotion”: “Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s
a broke soldier, senses that she requires
more prosperity, so five years later he
returns as almost a parody of it. So the
tragedy here is the death of the heart.”
The evidence exists, in Fitzgerald’s
complicated way, as we look at the text
and the biography. He was rived by
bitterness and profound envy toward the
rich. “I have never been able to forgive the
rich for being rich and it has colored my
entire life and works,” he wrote to his
agent. But this was the same man who, as
a child, liked to pretend he was the
foundling son of a medieval king. The
same man who fell in love with Zelda
because she looked expensive.
So much waffling, according to critics who
want less equivocation, less moonlight and
stronger moral stances. Except for those
critics who find the moralizing heavy-
handed and crave subtlety. What other
waves of analysis await us as the new
narratives rush in? How can one story
sustain them all? As we’re borne back,
ceaselessly into this one text, it becomes
clear that courting admiration might be
one path to literary immortality, but
courting endless interpretation might be
the safer bet. After all, there’s great honor
in being a supporting character