Book Review: The Great Gatsby

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 

Lulilai's Book Review:  The Great Gatsby

  

 

Nick Caraway has it right with Gatsby:  “Three’s a rotten crowd . . . you’re worth a whole damn bunch put together.” 

 

Nick talks of the napping, casual, superficial crowd which largely makes up the East Egg society.  Three characters lodge at East Egg:  Great Gatsby, his long, lost love Daisy, and her husband Tom Buchanan.  The East Eggers are the haves.  The West Eggers are the have-nots.  How do Gatsby differ from the Buchanan’s?  A gulf sets Gatsby’s world apart from Daisy's; new money stands apart from old money.  Daisy puts it laymen’s terms, “Rich girls do not marry poor men.”  The Prohibition era gives birth to the new riches —crap shooters, card-and-dice players who find new ways-and-means to make money stridently staining red marks on the satin cloaks and fashionable garbs on who is who of high society.  Readers get a good sense of the Jazz Age; elements like flippers and bootleggers play up to an old American culture.      

 

 

Gatsby in his “Dutch sailor eyes . . . fresh, green breast of the new world” dream of reuniting with Daisy.  Gatsby is convinced Daisy does not love her husband, Tom Buchanan.  He may be right but his dream had been lost long ago.  Gatsby lives in a fool’s paradise where his sand castle had been built to wobble and waver under the first waft of wind which brushes against it.  Daisy is . . . careless.  Airy and light, Daisy is feminine; like a daisy, it changes how it faces at each change of the wind.  Daisy is married to Tom and they are both careless:  “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy —they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money . . . whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”  Thus Tom and Daisy joined because they share a common trait.  Theirs have been meant to be; Gatsby has only imagined an ambiguous future with Daisy.

 

 

The Great Gatsby is a novel which best showcases one of writer’s themes:  individual vs. society.  Gatsby is an individual, a self-made man who worked hard to gain his riches affording him a big mansion, but his treasures are not meant to be prized by society.  His mansion fills up with empty guests who do not have a care for him.  His dream hinges on a girl who is too careless to wish him well.  And his fate is marked by murder:  Wilson, a mad man shoots him. 

 

 

The story of The Great Gatsby gets an A-.  That is just my opinion.  Re-reading the novel, I get a sense of the Jazz Age, the differing lifestyle of the East and West Eggers, and the old vs. new money.  Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Nick, and Jordan lend an insight to the rich and middle-class of society —large soirees/parties, golfing, and strife between two lives which fall into two differing groups.  Wilson and Myrtle shows folks from the other side of town.  However which way Myrtle had died in a car accident, Gatsby had been set up for the blame.  

I grade F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing style a B.  American writers are a rare gem especially a writer of the 20^th century.  Fitzgerald has written a novel that is one of American Classics, but his writing style is not as stellar as few writers in a league of gifted American writers or European imports who lived and wrote in the same generation.  Ernest Hemingway is an example of a gifted writer but his gift like many other talents came with human frailties; in his case, a long struggle with alcohol in his later years which ended his life with a deadly shot to his head.  Fitzgerald had none of the tragedies of gifted writers often face.  His writing style caters not to striving writers but to average readers.                         

 

 

I rewrote an early paragraph (page 9) from Fitzgerald’s novel.  Fitzgerald begins a paragraph with a pronoun, “It,” but its use is superfluous unless you write it in a style like Charles Dickens had in his novel:  “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”  Given the sentence, the use of “it” does not stylize the first sentence.  So I replaced it with a common, relatable noun, “Luck.”  I could have rewritten it with short clauses to catch a reader’s attention:  “Luck befalls” or “Luck happens.”  Short clauses can have a The Gazette or The National Inquirer effect so I stuck to the writer’s intended purpose replacing bigger words (found in formal documents at Board Room meetings) with shorter, relatable words.  I used another attention-getting style, an "Ah" interjection later on in the paragraph. Short words soften the sentence adding music and melody to reader’s listening ears like literature that uses alliteration.  I put in “S” and “E” words.                          

 

 

 

“It was a matter of chance that I should have [replace modal verb] rented a house in one of the strangest communities [change to less formal wording] in North America.  It was [Delete unnecessary phrase beginning w/pronouns] on that slender riotous island which extends itself dues east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of  [Use less formal word] land.  Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.  They are not perfect ovals —like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end —but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead.  To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon [sounds too formal] is their dissimilarity [use shorter word] in every particular except shaped and size.”

 

Lulilai's revised paragraph:

 

“Luck befalls as I settled in a fantastic dig at one of the off-beat places in North America:  on the slender island that stretches out on an easterly wind set out from New York and among other great sites, two stately lands abut.  Twenty miles from the city, a pair of impressive eggs identical in shape set apart by a bay which looms large and stretches out onto the deep sea waters in the Western Hemisphere —ah at the great barnyard of Long Island Sound.  No perfect ovals etch out like the Columbus egg; they lay flat on its outer edge and echo each other which bewilder the gulls that fly above in the skies.  Gulf of two individuals, a treasure that shares only their shapes and size.  To the wingless:  a novelty.”  

The novel has been adapted into three movies:  1949, 1974, and 2013.  American movie-goers may remember 1974 starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  The most modern version stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan.  The American classic has been engraved onto American cultural rock.  And so it remains with us.    

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby