Will I love The Great Gatsby?

Perfectly plotted, perfectly evocative of an age, and exquisitely written. My third read of this novel and its appeal and beauty certainly hasn’t faded with time.

I will admit that I re-read this book because I wasn't sure I truly appreciated it the first time around, when I was compelled to read it in an English class in high school. I enjoyed it, perhaps more, this second time around, but I still prefer Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as my go to hedonistic-post-mortems of the Lost Generation after World War One (see my above comments on Hemingway being my favorite anyway).

But the thing I liked that was new this time around (no need to go into the plot or lessons of such a well-worn book)… show more.

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

Everybody loves this book because it has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

Although I have often been told I should read this book, I never read it until this year. I thought it was brilliant. I loved Jay Gatsby's complex character. His impossible love for Daisy is beautifully written, and I found it achingly painful.

I loved the exquisite prose and the multi-layered metaphors that Fitzgerald creates, not least the impossibility of the American dream and the invisible barriers of class and money. I am still there, lost in the pages of the novel, with Nick Carraway mourning the loss of Gatsby and puzzling over the phenomenon that he was.

A book from the 1920s. The Jazz Age. This book will take you back to that age and time. A book about romance, class divide, and the ‘libertine.’

All the people you cheer for will die. And all the people who you don’t want to survive thrive! And yet, when you finish the book, the story will occupy your mind and heart for a long time. That is the impact of this book! 

I first read this book when I was twenty-four, late one night at the end of my second year in graduate school, the night before I left to spend the summer in New York. I have read it at least half a dozen times since, and it is like reading something new each time.

It isn’t just that I am reminded again of what it was like in the Jazz Age, a phrase Fitzgerald invented, when life for those rich enough to afford it was a party that lasted all summer and summer, banishing the seasons, lasted all year; it… show more.

I find it hard to avoid or even recognize the temptations that are inevitably attached to success. The excesses and immorality of the world he aspires to come back to bite Jay Gatsby when he becomes a victim of the vices he seeks to embrace.

All that glitters is not gold; in fact, gold is an irresistible snare that only those schooled in corruption can avoid. The pages of this book are filled with individual characters that jump off the page, but admirable traits are in short supply. Idealistic, romantic Gatsby himself is as close as we get to a… show more.

Some say that Gatsby is a critique of the corruption of the American dream and the careless rapacity of the Jazz Age. Sure. But who cares?

You love Gatsby because it is about the pursuit of a perfect love; the impossible longing to return to a more innocent, blameless past; and the tenderness of a man once Great brought to his knees by fate. It’s also about the guy who watches it all unfold. Nick Carraway, the unreliable narrator who lives in the little house beside Gatsby’s brilliant mansion, gets drawn into the romantic intrigue and reserves judgment as “a… show more.

Was the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic African-American?

A couple of academics have advanced that theory. I’m not sure I buy it. The notion (and supporting “evidence”) seems little more than a literary parlor game, not to mention the fact that nothing in Fitzgerald’s work or his letters shows a particular engagement with, or sympathy for, black Americans.

Still, it’s an interesting metaphor and the reason this seminal American novel appears in a list of what’s otherwise non-fiction. Gatsby’s yearning for his lost love could be an African-American yearning for a beloved country that does not always love… show more.