The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is not the book that I’ve been complaining about, that I (still!) haven’t been able to finish because it’s awful (not finishing it, either, screw that, so that is a post for another day). I picked up The Great Gatsby because it is also one of the last audiobooks I bought, and I bought that audiobook because it was another Frank Muller narration, but either way this book is also on my 52 books to read list. And, actually, this book falls into the rather large pile of books that I have read before but I may as well have been sleeping through at the time for all I remember about them.

And sleep through I probably did, in the most literal sense, because this book was assigned reading for my first year seminar in college (which, at my school, was sort of an introductory college class for freshmen, to help them bridge over the transition from high school to college level…the other three mandatory college classes being, what? A momentary diversion I guess…I still don’t know). Anyway, that seminar was in the English department and it had the tantalizingly grand title “The Jazz Age.” I picked that particular seminar because it promised to be a vibrant mixture of film, music, and literary studies on…well, you can imagine, and I figured that was a sound way of not being bored straight through it. It got me halfway there I suppose. We attended jazz concerts featuring our professor and his other ragtime professor buddies (yeah, it was pretty cool), watched Porgy and Bess in opera version (dear lord those were the longest four hours of my life, and I like musicals…an opera is like a musical right? No? hmm), and read really good works like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (so cracked out but I really did enjoy it) and other poetry by William Carlos Williams, and so on. And, of course, we read The Great Gatsby, and it’s not that this is an obvious choice for a class like this, but that it is the reason why there is a class like this. Fitzgerald himself coined the phrase The Jazz Age and he put it all there in this book. So it’s really very sad that I don’t particularly remember the class discussions but I’m positive (even though I have no real memory or proof of this) that it was the first book we read and that the tone of the class followed from there.

If you want to know what American literature was like during this period, and what the period itself was like, you start with this book. The Jazz Age starts after the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties when prohibition existed and the stock market would have taken the 2008 stock market out for Cristal to drown its sorrow, and on to the Great Depression. My English professor would have emphasized how the book illustrates the rise of the ‘nouveau-riche’ in the wake of a soaring stock market, their clash with the established wealthy sectors, the opulence, seductiveness, and flamboyance of the two, and how it all crashes down as the Great Depression starts to take hold. Fitzgerald fittingly describes the flashy, wealthy period but he criticizes it as well, symbolized by the ultimate hollowness and lack of morals of his characters. Gatsby, with his new-money (questionably obtained), earnestly chases a wonderful, dazzling dream personified by the so-called love of his life, Daisy, only to realize that the dream was more splendid, and probably worth more, than Daisy herself.

It is a very tragic novel because it offers a glimpse of wish fulfillment for an endearing and charming character (Gatsby) only to crush it under the malicious, self-preserving, oblivious actions of everyone else (except possibly the narrator, who tells Gatsby, in the only sincerely affectionate moment in the story, that he’s worth more than the lot of them). That’s not to say Gatsby is played to be a saint and everyone else is played to kick him down. On the contrary, none of the characters ever feel one-dimensional and, to some extent, they all undergo change and self-reflection. It was a very good read and it helped me realize that if a book is good, you’ll want to keep turning the page without having to force yourself to do it (god, I hate that other book).

I also need to relate this here because I don’t know where else I would do it, but one of my favorite parts about reading this was reading Fitzgerald’s biography and telling Rock, “I think if I ever have a girl I will name her Zelda. It’s a real name you know.” And Rock replies, “I know, she was the wife of Fitzgerald.” And I say, “How the hell do you know that?” “Where do you think the Nintendo name came from?” “No way.” “Yeah, Miyamoto says he named the character after her.” And this blows my mind because I never would have learned that tidbit without him and it makes me wonder what the hell else is stored in that noggin and honestly how can someone remember so many details about video games, ever? But he does and it truly is a very neat thing to me :)

Ta-da: Zelda's glamorous image also inspired the name of video game creator Shigeru Miyamoto's character Princess Zelda in his The Legend of Zelda video game series. Miyamoto explained, "Zelda was the name of the wife of the famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.