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.
We studied The Great Gatsby in high school and… I loved it and hated the people in it. For Australian teenagers, it was a very good way of seeing how that one aspect of the US can lure one in and how destructive it is. In other words, I do think it is a great book. It helped me see something I would otherwise have been blind to.
We read it as part of a group of US novels. The one I hated was Catcher in the Rye. The one I thought was brilliant but couldn’t reach emotionally was The Old Man and the Sea. The book that left me wondering why we had to read it at all was Bless the Beasts and Children. This was the 1970s, and to an Aussie teen it made no sense whatsoever. The one that entirely won me over to every single word the writer wrote was Of Mice and Men.
I think my dislike really is because I think the book is too sympathetic to Gatsby and has a little too much longing to want to be part of the “elite.” I was raised with contempt for both crooks and the careless elites, and I have not lost that feeling.
We didn’t read Catcher in the Rye in school — it has always been on banned books lists and was considered dangerous. I read it at 13 and loved it, then re-read it at 16 and hated it. I was smarter at 16. I still love Franny and Zooey, though any affection I ever had for Salinger has faded.
The Old Man and the Sea was good, but your take makes sense. I read a couple of other books by Hemingway, but that was the best one.
I think I vaguely knew the book Bless the Beasts and Children existed, but have never read it or even thought about it at all. That’s probably because it was a book aimed at teenagers that came out when I was grown, meaning it hadn’t been published yet when I was in high school. It does not sound appealing.
I like Of Mice and Men, but I was already reading Steinbeck by the time we got to it in school. I think The Winter of Our Discontent was my favorite of his back then. I read The Grapes of Wrath later. When it comes to good 20th century writers, I read more good books out of school than for class — our English classes tended to require the blandest possible books. I still recall being told I couldn’t read The Short Reign of Pippin IV for a book report because it was “too advanced” for 16-year-olds.
We also read books in French class that would never have been allowed in English classes, probably because the principal and other authorities didn’t read French. We read Gide and Camus and probably others. My experience of literature classes in English (including in college) made me trust my own judgment in reading over that of any English teacher. Classes outside of the English department did a better job of opening my eyes to good literature.
My favourite Steinbeck is Pippin. And Gatsby was much easier to read as an Australian, because it was all alien: we didn’t have to identify or like any character, though I and my friends tried very hard to like Gatsby. The US in the 70s was such a foreign land, and the US in the past was even more foreign. This most definitely made it easier to appreciate the novel.
We read Camus (in translation) at school. I didn’t reach Gide until university and never liked him. He’s one of those writers who I really, really didn’t want to meet.
The older I get the more I discover that my very ordinary high school had a really excellent English curriculum. English was the compulsory subject, and most students matriculated, so my generation of Victorians are somewhat more literate than I expected. I didn’t discover this until later, of course.
It sounds like you were fortunate in your English classes. I had a few good teachers — my seventh grade teacher would close the blinds and read Poe stories, which is perfect for 12-year-olds. She also taught us to diagram sentences and made it fun, and that’s the grammar lesson I use to this day. I had a couple of others in high school, but they were constrained by someone else’s plans for the curriculum, so while they were good teachers, we didn’t read much of interest.
I can’t even remember much of Gide. I cited him as an example of the fact that we read books there we wouldn’t have read in English class because they were too racy or “advanced.” In truth, I got a better exposure to literature from my parents, my friends, foreign language classes, classics, American studies, and some seminars than I ever did in traditional English classes in high school or college. Hmm. I’m a writer who avoided being an English major and was a journalist who avoided studying journalism. But I still loved college. I wouldn’t mind going back and doing my undergraduate studies all over again with different subjects — some anthropology and geology and enough Spanish to get to literature classes and more history. Maybe I’d give 19th century American literature a shot nowadays — I avoided it like the plague when I was in school.