The Achieving of The Great Gatsby

"As an academic, I thought I should have at least one work of literary criticism on my list. I like this book for a couple of reasons. First of all it’s a bit older, which means it doesn’t fall into the language of literary criticism today, which has become a very technical, jargon-ridden language that I’m not really a fan of. I certainly don’t think most modern literary criticism is accessible to a non-academic reader, but this book is older and so it’s written for a generalist, rather than a specialist. As its title suggests, it’s a book that’s interested in Fitzgerald’s development and his evolution, how he transitions from a younger writer of satire and short stories into the artist who produced Gatsby. Initially, Fitzgerald was a writer of great promise but not of great control. When you compare This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned to The Great Gatsby, one thing that strikes you about the first two novels is how much crazier they are. They’re a bit mad, really – they range all over the place. There’s a sense that here is this young writer throwing anything he can think of at you, and maybe he’ll add the kitchen sink. One sees a lack of discipline – he has so much talent and he is just running wild on the page in places. It’s exuberant and surprising and fun, but it’s also self-indulgent. In the early novels, he let himself do virtually anything – and he could do a great many things because he was certainly a genius – but it was not particularly controlled or focused. Then you get to Gatsby , which is so perfectly controlled – “intricately patterned”, as he said. Long’s book is interested in how Fitzgerald came to do that, what he was reading, who he was writing to. He shows the important literary influences on Fitzgerald, writers like Joseph Conrad, who was terribly important to the eventual shape of Gatsby . He learned from Conrad the technique of using the narrator who is also a marginal participant. Charles Marlow tells the story in Heart of Darkness , but isn’t himself the protagonist. Fitzgerald does something very similar with Nick Carraway, who knows Gatsby and is involved with him, but is also an observer. In the second half of the book, he gives a very good overview of what most of us think of as Gatsby’s great literary virtues. He gives a clear sense of why it is that people think it is such a masterpiece, both the story and meaning but also on the level of language itself. Gatsby isn’t just a great story – what really makes it a masterpiece is Fitzgerald’s prose, the near-perfection of his sentences and the surprise and power of his images and symbols. He said he wanted it to be an “intricately patterned” novel, as I said, and you see that pattern created in his language. This is something that many critics have explored at great length, but I think Long does a good job of conveying the main ideas about what Fitzgerald does with his images, themes and metaphors and the importance of symbols in the novel. It’s just a very solid overview of what the main themes and ideas of Gatsby are, so it’s a good introduction for someone trying to get a sense of what all the fuss is about."