by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The ultimate Jazz Age novel
Reviewed by: G-Lock
About G-Lock
Gorgeous, wealthy women and their dashing, educated suitors. Beautiful Long Island homes. Fabulous parties. Obsession. Jealousy. Death.
No, this isn't Candace Bushnell's latest "Sex and the City" entry or a tawdry Jackie Collins novel but F. Scott Fitzgerald's lasting ode to the Roaring Twenties, THE GREAT GATSBY. By now rightfully stuff of legend, GATSBY is an account of an eventful Nassau County summer told by trusted first-person narrator Nick Carraway. Although not the smash Fitzgerald had hoped for/needed in his lifetime, the book has aged like a fine wine.
Nick arrives at West Egg (a thinly veiled Great Neck), the "less fashionable" of two identical land masses jutting into Long Island Sound. His neighbor is a gossiped-about man who hosts extravagant parties and yet remains somewhat of an enigma to the denizens who regularly descend upon his grounds. Nick's across-the-bay cousin, the Southern belle Daisy Baker, shares a secret with this stranger, and the torrid affair that ensues escalates into mistaken-identity tragedy.
At just under two hundred pages, the book is slim. But do not mistake GATSBY for a quick read. The prose should be enough to give you pause ("He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that 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.") The colorful imagery and foreshadowing will bring back literature lectures ("The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner.") The framework of the narrative was innovative for its time and remains effective in its guidance of the plot trajectory.
GATSBY is many things to many people. It's a time capsule of the pre-Depression years. It's a classic love story. It's a window into the mind of the struggling author. It's a story about nostalgia amid change. It can even be all of these at the same time.
(Consider this exchange between Nick and Gatsby:
"'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'
'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.'")
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Great Gatsby
Copyright © by G-Lock, 2002
Reviewed by G-Lock :
-- The Corrections
- by Jonathan Franzen
-- Naked
- by David Sedaris
-- The Epic of New York City
- by Edward Robb Ellis
-- The Catcher in the Rye
- by J.D. Salinger
-- The Great Gatsby
- by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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