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I both like and love The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because I read it in high school, when it was assigned. I did not. I plagiarized from the Cliff Notes. The first time I ‘read’ it (I have since read it in book form two or three times) was when I listened to it on cassette tape. Nick, the narrator, was read by a very young, very talented Christopher Reeves and it enraptured me as I drove three hours through a rain storm to pick my son up from a class camping trip at Pt. Reyes. Also not because some idiot thought that Robert Redford would make a good Gatsby (like who in the world would ever turn him down for Tom? Are you kidding me? I mean Daisy’s not molecular biology researcj scientist material but even she’s not that dumb). Not because the Baz Luhrman movie was such a miss (Oy, the shirt scene. Did he actually even READ that book?).
I love the book because what makes Gatsby so great is not his wealth or braggadocio but the depth of his love and devotion for the sadly unworthy Daisy. Gatsby as a character starts out, like most of us, a small man, an ordinary human being with ordinary needs and wants. Only his love for Daisy elevates him. The grandness of his passion for her. That grandness, that’s what makes him Great and I love that,
But why I like Gatsby as a work of art is because it runs counter-intuitive to all the fairy tales I loved so much as a girl. In those tales, I, and others little girls like me. were told, that the Maiden has to work hard, very hard, to make herself thin enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, odor free enough and socially appropriate enough to find and catch Prince Charming. When he finally appears he will fall hard, but no harder than her. He will slam a glass shoe on her preternaturally lovely and very small foot and take her as his own. The ending in those tales is always that they get married and they live happily ever after.
There is no ‘ever after’ after that ‘ever after’. You are born, you make yourself worthy, you touch but not kiss a couple of frogs, find Mr. Right, snag him and then your narrative ends. His story goes on, he tries to do some heroic things but then just goes on to get novels written about his infidelities.
The Princess, post nuptials, however, is never heard from again.
Gatsby starts there or shortly thereafter. A few years after the rice and the flowers are thrown.
In boorish Tom and ultimately homicidal Daisy we have a perfect portrait of the dreariness of marriage in their best of all possible worlds. They are libidinous, although not for one another. They are beautiful, young, wealthy. Success beads from them like sweat on a fat pastrami. But they are vapid, infantile, lethargic and frankly, a little tedious. They literally do not know how to have fun and they crave fun more than goldfish crackers are craved at a freshman mixer.
That’s the part I like. The part where Fitzgerald accidentally tells us little girls a tale he might not have meant to tell.