So this would’ve been an age of high self-regard. They were as aware as ever of what it meant to perform versions of oneself-there once were Black people who, in painting their faces black, performed as white people performing them. By the twenties, Black Americans were messing around, too. American popular entertainment erupted from that kind of messy disruption of the self the very first time a white guy painted his face black. The twenties were a drunken, giddy glade between mountainous wars and financial collapse. The gleam seemed flimsy at a time when a reader was still in search of writing that seeped subcutaneously. The dazzle of his prose didn’t do for people in 1925 what it’s done for everybody afterward. He’s made time both a character in the novel and an ingredient in the book’s recipe for eternity. What- who?-have I missed? Fitzgerald was writing ahead of his time. Yet I, too, returned, seduced, eager to detect. It’s too smooth for tragedy, underwrought. The critics called it a dud! I know what they meant. But nothing rippled upon its release in 1925. This is to say that the novel may not make such an indelible first impression. Nonetheless, everybody’s got coins in their eyes. The difference between Fitzgerald and, say, Upton Sinclair, who wrote, among other tracts, The Jungle, is that Sinclair was, among many other things, tagged a muckraker and Fitzgerald was a gothic romantic, of sorts. We might not have been ready to hear that in 1925, even though the literature of industrialization demanded us to notice. The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion. Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. The tragedy is not that usual stuff about love not being enough or arriving too late to save the day. Tragedy tends to need some buildup Fitzgerald dunks you in it. Nick’s affection for Gatsby is entirely posthumous. It cuts deeper every time I sit down with it. The second front entails the book’s heartlessness. “The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses”? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life. Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. But mostly it’s a premonition.Įach time, its fineness announces itself on two fronts. Who are any of these people-Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. In this way, The Great Gatsby achieves hypnotic mystery. What is she hoping to find? Whether Gatsby strikes her as more cynical, naive, romantic, or pitiful? After decades with this book, who emerges more surprised by Nick’s friendship with Gatsby? The reader or Nick? What I don’t know is how long it takes her. I know of someone-a well-heeled white woman in her midsixties-who reads this book every year. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir Gatsby was your friend. In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book-booooo, Jordan just boo. Only in this most recent time did I choose to attack it in a single sitting. Otherwise, all the mystery seeps away, leaving Jay Gatsby lingering, ethereal but elusive, like cologne somebody else is wearing. It should be consumed in the course of a day. Why do we keep reading The Great Gatsby? Why do some of us keep taking our time reading it? F.