I have my dad’s old copy from 1980 (cover price $4.95!) that I unashamedly totally stole from his collection sometime in high school.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publication: 1925
Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction
I should not love this book as much as I do. Nothing good happens within its pages, and quite a lot of bad things do. Virtually all of the characters are awful human beings. And yet it’s sad and beautiful and full of lovely language, and I can’t stop returning to it.
I’ve read Gatsby at least three, if not four or five times. I think I read it the first time in high school after stealing my dad’s copy on a whim, but fifteen years later I’m not 100% sure it wasn’t assigned in my junior year English class first. This time I read into it a few things I hadn’t noticed before; I think the fact that this I’m quite close to the age of most of the characters gives me a different perspective than younger me.
Anyway, Gatsby is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway, a wealthy midwesterner in his late twenties who moves to Long Island and promptly finds himself enmeshed in a debacle involving his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Adultery, debauchery, and general mayhem follow, with Nick as the somewhat unwilling observer. I’ve always identified with Nick more than a reader is probably supposed to, given that he’s a fairly passive observer for most of the events of the novel. Yet something about his general attitude of “What are you crazy people DOING and why are you dragging me along with you?” has always resonated with me.
I love how sparse it is. Gatsby doesn’t waste any space - each of the nine chapters has a particular purpose in advancing the story. You can imagine a contemporary author making the same plot last three times as long, but it wouldn’t add anything of substance. Every bit is necessary.
I know it’s cliche to like this book. I also know it contains racist language and attitudes about Black and Jewish people that aren’t acceptable in any era, and it can only be read as a product of its time. I recognize that I’m reading a book by a white guy, written largely for white people. It also has spoken to me across fifteen years of growth in a way no other book has. It’s a brief, bittersweet reminder that we can’t live in the past. I’m not going to rate it, and I’m not going to say it’s a great book that everybody should check out. But I did read it again during this quarantine period, and it’s no good to pretend I didn’t.