The Great Gatsby

"I'm a sucker for efficiency. This book gets so much out of what is, ultimately, a rather slim story."

"Very early in the book, Fitzgerald writes, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” One of the things I love about teaching Gatsby is tracing the ways in which some people get to be personalities in the earlier sense of the term—personality as that which makes someone a human being as opposed to an animal or object. Some people get to be characters, and some people can only be gestures or (as Fitzgerald describes Gatsby) a seismograph: “one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” This is one of the great tensions about the different definitions of personality and how they relate to definitions of the self. Is personality an extension of some essential self? Is it the self forcefully expressed, and externally expressed? Or is personality simply a series of performances about selfhood that can vary according to the different contexts that one is in? Does my personality (and sense of self) change when I’m sitting in this room, talking to you, giving this interview, versus when I’m at home with my children? Can I have multiple selves based on what socio-institutional context I inhabit, or is there something truly immutable and unchangeable about personality? “Is personality an extension of some essential self?…Or is personality simply a series of performances about selfhood that can vary according to the different contexts that one is in?” To me, these questions map one of the key philosophical tensions of the book. The reason I love teaching Gatsby is because I think it so brilliantly encapsulates that, and so much of reading that book for students is trying to figure out who Jay Gatsby or James Gatz is and, by extension, what it means to exist as a person in the world or a character in a work of fiction. Fitzgerald’s fictions are filled with performers, with actresses and actors who are highly attentive to the ways in which they’re speaking and gesturing, and the ways in which their performances of self are being perceived by others. Those perceptions, in turn, affect their performances. Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories track these highly sophisticated feedback loops of personality. The whole plot of Tender is the Night , for instance, can be traced by the moments when people stare at each other’s faces and adjust their faces in response: Dick at Rosemary’s, Rosemary at Dick’s, Rosemary at Nicole’s, all possible permutations of people self-consciously adjusting their visible personalities weaving us in and out of the Diver’s marriage. The most thrilling moments in Fitzgerald’s fictions are when those performances seem to escape the control of the performer. I think this is why people are so drawn to the scene of piling the shirts in The Great Gatsby , when Gatsby is described as “running down like an overwound clock.” On the one hand, it’s an intense, predictable performance of class and taste, and on the other hand, it’s always on the verge of slipping into something that looks like madness, a “many colored disarray,” or, in the most recent film adaptation, total ecstasy. That seems to me one of the essential tensions of personality that Fitzgerald’s novels do an amazing job expressing."

"Gatsby is a book that is, in some ways, ambivalent about glamour and wealth. It entices us with the glamour of the parties and the wonderful material aspects of Gatsby’s life – but it shows that his falling for the false promises of materialism destroys him. The phrase that Fitzgerald uses, which I really like, is “enchanted objects”. Gatsby is a book about what we now call conspicuous consumption – the symbolic objects that are of terrible importance to all of us, and may have terrible effects on us, but we still seem to want them. Or we are taught to want them, anyway. “Enchanted objects” are symbols – what we think of as brands and labels, having the nicest things . For Gatsby, his house is very important. It’s how he proves that he has arrived and how rich he is. He doesn’t want to be reunited with Daisy at her house – he insists on getting her to his, so he can show it to her. His Rolls-Royce, which is absurdly ostentatious – Tom Buchanan calls it his “circus wagon” of a car – is another symbol of his wealth. To put it in modern terms, although it will sound anachronistic, Gatsby is all about bling. He flings his coloured shirts at Daisy and she bursts into tears. Gatsby is a pursuer of symbols – most famously, of course, that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. We are pursuers of symbols too – that’s what brands are. That’s something that our society obviously understands and is in thrall to, and yet Gatsby is also a novel that shows the hollowness of this promise, how corrupt and dangerous it is. This destructive glamour seems to me to perfectly capture our ambivalent moment. The fact is that we are all learning the hard way how empty and poisonous, how toxic our chasing of materialism and wealth has been, and yet we’re not really ready to let go of it either. It’s not as if we’ve all suddenly thrown away all our “enchanted objects” and are now living a simple, basic, pared-down subsistence-level existence stripped of consumerism and materialism. We’re in that same space as Gatsby: We want the glamour and we’re enchanted by the objects and yet we are reluctantly recognising how toxic that whole world is. Gatsby not only is the first novel that really understands all of that, but it also plays to both sides of our emotional ambivalence right now. We’re not reading Depression-era texts, partly because we want to stave that off. We’re hoping we won’t get into a Depression. Fitzgerald was ahead of his time, of course. Gatsby came out in 1925 and the Wall Street Crash was in October 1929, and that is part of his clairvoyance, that he saw it all so early. Essentially we’re in a 1929 mentality: It’s all crumbling beneath us, but we’re trying to cling on and hoping it won’t all disappear. Jazz Age was a phrase used to describe the 1920s. Fitzgerald took credit for coining the phrase and it became a very popular way for them to talk about their own era. The thing to remember is that in the early 1920s jazz wasn’t necessarily as respectable as it is now – Zelda Fitzgerald, Scott’s wife, called it that “once-déclassé jazz”. Many critics then talked about jazz rather the way we refer to pop music today. It was often a term of opprobrium: Fitzgerald was called a jazz writer by critics who wanted to say that he was basically “pop” – meaning he was light and frothy and a bit tacky. But for the younger generation, jazz was exciting – it was energy, vitality, surprise, improvisation, throwing out the old and embracing the new."

"It’s the shortest book that has been a perennial nominee. The central figure, Jay Gatsby, migrates from the Midwest to the East, trying to break into the upper crust. But Gatsby’s means of getting the wealth that he wields is bootlegging. He’s viewed through the lens of a prim and proper but sympathetic first-person narrator who is his neighbor on Long Island in the Roaring Twenties. There’s a mixture of moral disapproval and admiration for Gatsby’s charm, chutzpah, and idealism in grasping for the stars, the golden girl of his imagination. The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading . Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism."

"Its only real competition is “The Great Gatsby,” another short, nearly perfect book that illuminates something essential about the American character."

"I still return to The Great Gatsby every few years. I have always been fascinated by double lives, people who exist with one personality on the outside and another in an interior world."

"I seem to reread 'The Great Gatsby' more than any other novel, and the ending never fails to leave me happily melancholic."

"My favorite novelists are Proust and Tolstoy, closely followed by Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Hemingway when he isn’t beating his chest."

"They are good books to be stuck with; one might never tire of such luminous, shimmering prose."

"To nestle into a worn leather club chair and smooth out the first pristine page of "The Great Gatsby" or "Cutting for Stone" is to transcend into a world of dialogue and unexpected turns and essence of humanity that feels like heaven itself."

""The Great Gatsby," for the perils of life lived as a series of gestures."

"“The Great Gatsby” has always been a standout as far as love stories go. Jay Gatsby is such a mysterious and sexy character, and as a reader one can feel Daisy’s yearning to be closer to him, yet he always manages to pull away."

"With Gatsby it's all about style. I try to reread it every summer for rhythm and flow."

"If you read ‘Gatsby’ before 21, it was a good book, but reading it again 20 years later, you find a great Gatsby."

"Just to see what it's possible to do with the English language. That famous last sentence still rings in my ears."

"I learned that if you read "The Great Gatsby" aloud to your 12-year-old daughter she might not want to stop and go to bed in the middle of a chapter."

"Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" stands out. There are so many Tom Buchanans in the world now. Running it."

"I just reread "The Great Gatsby," which I do every few years. There is something voluptuous, intoxicating in Fitzgerald's prose which never fails to seduce me."