The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Book Reviews of The Great Gatsby
Book Review: The Late Gatsby
Summary: 2 Stars
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a fictional novel portraying the lives of wealthy young citizens of West and East-Egg, Long Island. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was his chance for something new. It was his chance for what he believed was greatness. Today the Great Gastby's name is synonymous with that of Fitzgerald's. Fitzgerald's novel includes love,mystery, and a myriad of events that would lead to downfall and tragedy.
The story takes place around the jazz era. Nick, the narrator of the story is a young gentlman who comes out to the west into Long Island into a bonds business. He spends his summer with his cousin Daisy Bunchanan, her husband Tom Buchanan, and their friend/tennis star, Jordan Baker. Nick is fascinated by the mystery and lifestyle of his neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby, the topic of the story, is a man who had built an empire for himself which eventually like many empires, fall. As much as Gatsby is great, he is plagued with many rumors.
Gatsby befriends Nick to get to his cousin Daisy whom he was once in love with five years ago before he had gone to war. He goes through many obstacles such as Daisy's husband Tom and his fear of rejection once again. It turns out that Daisy had rejected him in the past because he was too poor. Gatsby makes his way up top through some illegal activities accompanied by his friend Meyer Wolfshiem. For years Gastby had been hosting parties and moved to West Egg to lure Daisy and to meet her once again. After wising to the fact that Nick was her cousin he had found his trump card.
However this novel does not end in fairy tale. It is more of a Shakespeareian play, a tragedy. Althoygh I'm more partial to happy endings, the twist in the story does very well suit it. The story is wonderfully pieced together, in storym plot, and ending but it lacks excitement. Maybe Fitzgerald was headed in the direction of simplicity but this is definitely too simplistic.
I don't agree with Fitzgerald's title for the story. To my knowledge there was nothing great about Gatsby. He used people to his advantage like the way he used Nick to get to Daisy. To get Nicks help he would even in a manner, bribe him. Was it because he was rich and famous? He became rich through illegal acitvities such as bootlegging with shady figures such as Wolfshiem and he was just as famous as rumors about him were. There is nothing great about that struggling man. A more appropriate title would be "The Late Gatsby". He is dead inside.
I found some parts of the story quite blurry and hard to understand. Was the role of Tom Buchanan a bad man or a good yet misunderstood man? Some say he's a brute but was his actions justifiable? I believe they were; he was only standing up for his wife. He does admit to loving his wife Daisy and tries to keep Gatsby away from her. Is he wrong for doing so? In one man's opinion he may be protecting his family from a home wrecker and in another man's opnion he may be blocking the starving lover from his candy of his eye.
In the end I believe this isn't much of a reading material. I was easily bored. Maybe the story could have been more interesting had Fitzgerald created a much better narrator. Everything in this story wa pure descriptive. Although it was pieced together well, it lacked substance. Maybe this story would be more appealing to the older age groups but to keep interest in teenage readers, I would have to disagree. It is not really a bad story in terms of construction, just in the ability to maintain a reader's interest.
Book Review: illusion vs. reality; silence is not golden; a facade of gaiety comes crashing down
Summary: 4 Stars
I first read The Great Gatsby when I was in college, for a 20th Century American Fiction class with Dr. Karen Johnson at Indiana University at Indianapolis. I think, due to my procrastination, I had to do so just a few days before a paper on some aspect of it was due. Can't remember what the topic was, but I know I turned it in late and Dr. Johnson was not pleased. I got a "C," I think. Now, 25 years later, I read it again at the suggestion of Robert Girardi, author of several books and a collection of short stories ("A Vaudeville of Devils," which I liked very much - a shameless plug).
Wow. Did I even read this book then? I must have done so quickly and without much attention because it was a very good novel. A bit slow at the beginning, but as I learned about the characters and their connections to one another, I had to keep reading to see how it would all end. Tragically, by the way. And you see it coming, though I wasn't expecting to end as tragically as it did. Don't read further if you don't want to know what happens...
So many people lying, living in a dream world: Gatsby, holding on to a past love/infatuation, believing he can re-create it years later, with a new name, a false front and all the trappings of a cultured, wealthy young man (actually gained through criminal activity); Daisy, aware of her husband's affair with someone, yet not confronting him, and engaging in an affair of her own with Gatsby that is really doomed from the start; Myrtle, who thinks Tom loves her more than his wife, but that illusion is "crushed" along with her nose; the guests of Gatsby, attending his parties only to get drunk and have some fun, most not knowing their host and not caring if they don't, parties only held so Gatsby can see Daisy again. And then there's Nick Carraway, the narrator, a self-described "honest man" who fails to confront these illusions with the truth. He doesn't tell his cousin Daisy about the details of her husband Tom's affair. Shouldn't he have, out of love for her? And he never really confronts Gatsby about his fantasy about re-connecting with Daisy, the long-lost love of his youth. Couldn't he have "talked some sense into him," again, if he really cared about Gatsby? And when they all have it out at the hotel in NYC, why doesn't Nick call Tom on the carpet about his second life with Myrtle, as Tom is attacking Gatsby for his affair with Daisy? Finally, Nick could have told Wilson the truth about Myrtle and Tom after the accident, so Wilson's rage and desire for revenge would have not been misplaced. He could also have told the police that it was Daisy, not Gatsby, who was driving the car, and that it was Tom that was having an affair with Wilson's wife. Tom and Daisy make off like bandits, though not without scars, the illusion of their marriage apparently safe and sound; Myrtle and Wilson and Gatsby all experience the ultimate fantasy killer, death. Even Gatsby's dad is allowed to believe that he had a good boy, a smart boy, a successful boy. And Nick doesn't shatter his illusion. Out of compassion? Fear? Indifference? Speak up Nick; have some courage. You're "one of the most honest people you know." So tell the truth to the people around you and maybe you can help them face reality and have better, honest lives, even if the price is the death of their fantasies and pretense. Your silence helped kill these people, in a way.
My two cents. Dr. Johnson, are you out there? I read it for real this time. What do you think? The makings of a decent paper?
Mike Haigerty
Book Review: the good (but not great) "gatsby"
Summary: 4 Stars
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grown in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer" (4)
"When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness" (21)
"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world" (68)
"It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart." (96)
"Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air." (108)
"...--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder" (110)
"'Madame expects you in the salon!' he cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life" (115)
"I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. [...] Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair." (135)
"...and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that weath imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" (150)
"The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised." (150)
"It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete" (162)
"[Mr. Gatz] had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise" (168)
"But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away" (177)
"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...." (179)
"He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night" (180)
such lush and gorgeous sentences filled this small book. delivered in an effortless manner. i like very much the portraits fitzgerald summoned up of each of the main characters. having said this, i don't believe this book is THE Great American Novel, as some critics would have it. i don't know if it's even great. it's a fairly good read, but to bestow such laurels on this novel is a bit of a stretch.
Book Review: The Doppler Effect...
Summary: 5 Stars
...applied to the star rating of books. In brief, the Doppler effect addresses the perceived frequency of waves, such as a fire truck's siren, by taking into account the actual frequency, and the relative speeds of the source of the sound, and the observer. So too with books; your opinion is so often determined by your particular circumstances, perhaps rushing towards the source, or enjoying the lengthening perspective that life in its fullness can provide. Unlike so many of the now familiar 1-star reviews, written by students forced to read the book as an assignment, I first read this book, of my own free will, more or less, when I was in Vietnam, some 40 plus years ago. When you are living in a bunker, the whining of the rich, and their self-induced troubles, does not go down well, and if Amazon had existed then, the best I could have mustered would have been a 2-star rating.
But a friend chided me into undertaking a second read. And I found a finely crafted novel, yes, concerning the rich, primarily; set in the early years of the "Roaring 20's." The story is told through the voice of Ned Carraway, standing in that proverbial inertial reference frame, a migrant from the Mid-West, attempting to scratch a living by selling bonds on Wall Street, and living in modest circumstances on Long Island. The book's essential theme is lost love, or more precisely, lost opportunities in courtship, and involves the title character, Jay Gatsby (né Jimmy Gatz), and his desire for Tom Buchanan's wife, Daisy, whom he had briefly known before her marriage. She requites, for sure. The "minor characters" do their share of suffering. There is plenty of philandering all around, and a somewhat predictable Greek tragedy denouement.
Fitzgerald tells his story well, and it is relatively fast-paced and dense. There are sufficient insights to maintain the interest. Tom exudes much of the stupidity and bigotry that so often goes with wealth. Consider the following statement: "...Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard, and have intermarriage between black and white." At another point, Fitzgerald says of Tom: "As for Tom, the fact that he `had some woman in New York' was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his preemptory heart."
But the primary focus is on Gatsby. And therein were some problems. Somerset Maugham did the "obsession with a woman" thing to perfection. Fitzgerald's explanation of Gatsby's obsession was substantially weaker. And then there is the matter of his rapid acquisition of wealth. Could it have occurred so quickly, under any circumstances, since the novel was set in the early 20's, instead of the late 20's?
The Rich really are different than you and me, as the old saw goes. The concentration of wealth in the United States, even in the midst of the Great Recession, exceeds even that of the `20's, so the foibles, prejudges, and contrived problems of the lucky, or is it unlucky few, from that prior era, merit another look, as the wavelength of that receding period lengthens, along with perspective of the reader.
A 5-star read, but not one of the 10 best American novels of all time.
Book Review: ON THE ART OF REINVENTING ONESELF-AND THE CRAFT OF TELLING THE TALE
Summary: 5 Stars
One would have to be rather pedantic not recognize that F. Scott Fitzgerald was an important novelistic voice of the Jazz Age in post World War I America. Certainly nobody has chronicled the end of the age of American innocence signaled by the Jazz Age better than Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald certainly was not the only voice of that age but the voice that best exemplified the tensions between the mores of `old wealth' and the emerging sources of `new wealth' that were produced by the huge amount of money available, mainly through government contracts, as result of the war or riches gained through the illegal liquor trade. That is the sociological underpinning that drives Fitzgerald's work.
There is no better example of those tensions than Jay Gatsby. If nothing else it is a dramatic enactment of the strivings of the new money to `make it' in the world of high society, one way or another. And what better way to do that than in the age old tradition of buying one's way into that society through marriage. This is the modern American version of that story.
And the story itself? One Jay Gatsby, the former Jimmy Ganz, freshly reinventing himself after indeterminate service in the American military in World War I and loaded with cash from questionable financial resources, attempts to win, or rather re-win the affections of one Daisy Buchanan his vision of the perfect life companion and exemplar of the `old money' crowd that he wishes to crash. One little complication, however, gets in the way. She has found herself married to a brutish but very wealthy member of that `old money' crowd. Gatsby's lavish but fumbling attempts to lure her away from the high society of Long Island, then the summer watering hole of the `old money', forms the core of the story.
Gatsby's trial and tribulations on the way as narrated by Nick Carroway (and Gatsby's somewhat unwitting accomplice in the Daisy matter) keeps the story line going until the final deadly ending. The morale- the very rich are indeed very different from you or I. Moreover, someone else will always have to pick up the messes they have made for themselves. They merely move on. This may serve as a cautionary tale for that time and possibly today.
A word on literary merits. According to the inevitable changes in literary fashion as well as literary politics Fitzgerald, for long a leading figure in the canon of American literature, has been somewhat eclipsed by other more post-modernist trends. While I firmly believe that the Western canon is in dire need of expansion to include `third world', woman and minority voices Fitzgerald's literary merits stand on their own. His tightly- crafted story line, his sense of language and the flat-out fact that that he knew the subject matter that formed the basis of his expositions merit renewed consideration by today's reader.
Simply put, if you want to understand part of what was going on in America in the 1920's before the Great Crash of 1929 then you simply have to read the man. If nothing else read the last few pages of Gatsby. If there is a better literary expression of the promise of America as seem by the early Dutch settlers of New York as the last best hope of civilization and the failure of that promise at the hands of the `robber barons' and their descendents I have not read it.