I have never been a fan of The Great Gatsby, considering it incredibly overrated. Fitzgerald wrote lovely sentences, but he and the others of his era (most notably Hemingway) who were competing – in their own little circles – to see who could write The Great American Novel were not nearly as important and influential as they and some English teachers like to proclaim.
I’ve always thought that, in rating male American writers of the first half of the 20th Century, neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway could hold a candle to Dashiell Hammett. And if there is a Great American Novel, it’s Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
But there is some value in Gatsby, as the recent Gatsby-themed party thrown by the grifter currently occupying our White House makes clear. Anyone who has read the book would consider holding that event particularly tone-deaf, particularly when the party was scheduled for the day that SNAP benefits were running out.
Of course, the grifter-in-chief doesn’t read. And as Paul Krugman pointed out in his newsletter this week, the grifter isn’t tone deaf. He enjoys cruelty.
I have read the book, twice in fact. Once when I was young and again about a dozen years ago when it was being raved about once again by the literati on the occasion of it entering the public domain. I wasn’t impressed either time by the book, though I deplored the culture it described in both cases.
I wrote about it after the second read and republished that essay a few years back.
Many of the reports on the party – and not a few people on social media – have quoted one of the great lines from the book:
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.
It is a wonderful sentence and a true indictment of many of the wealthy people in the United States, not just those who, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, came from relatively old money, but also the newly minted oligarchs we see today.
It’s not a surprise that the author of the book about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg called it Careless People. We have a lot of those in positions of power these days.
But nobody is talking much about Jay Gatsby himself. Gatsby is putting on a great show, but he is a criminal, a true thug. He came from nothing and stole his way to wealth and almost to respectability. He was not careless, at least not until the end when he saw he was not going to get everything he wanted and threw it all away.
The Gatsby in our current story is, of course, the grifter currently occupying (and tearing down) our White House. He came from more money, but his enterprises are as dishonest as Gatsby’s and of course he is still the boy from Queens who felt snubbed by the upper class in Manhattan.
One can hope he will do something so foolish as to bring it all down on himself, but so far that hasn’t happened.
One reason I don’t particularly like the book, and also the reason why I think none of the critics are focusing enough on the fact that Gatsby is, in fact, a criminal (Molly Jong-Fast does mention it in her op-ed in The New York Times), is that Nick, the narrator of the story, has a positive view of Gatsby.
It could be argued that Nick’s view is Fitzgerald’s view, especially given Fitzgerald’s feelings about old money. As a writer, I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to assume the narrator is speaking for the author, but it is hard not to in this particular case.
I think there are scholars who think Nick is in love with Gatsby, but as some of the critics of Freud say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not everything is about sex.
I think Nick, who has ties to old money people but none of the money, liked Gatsby’s style and the way he was seducing the ultra-rich. He (and probably Fitzgerald) hated the Buchanans of this world more than he hated successful criminals.
But Gatsby is still a criminal and a rather nasty one at that. The book glides past that, but Fitzgerald was at least honest enough to mention it.
I find it hard to like a book that is sympathetic to a man like Gatsby. And I think Nick’s appreciation of Gatsby is a clear indictment of a culture that allowed us to put a criminal in the White House. Books like this glorify the criminals who manage to worm their way into the elite.
Anyway, per usual, the grifter in the White House put on a show that would never make it past a rational editor at any publishing house. Be nice if those particular gatekeepers had some kind of veto power on what actually happens in the world.