The Great Gatsby

Although I have often been told I should read this book, I never read it until this year. I thought it was brilliant. I loved Jay Gatsby's complex character. His impossible love for Daisy is beautifully written, and I found it achingly painful.

I loved the exquisite prose and the multi-layered metaphors that Fitzgerald creates, not least the impossibility of the American dream and the invisible barriers of class and money. I am still there, lost in the pages of the novel, with Nick Carraway mourning the loss of Gatsby and puzzling over the phenomenon that he was.

A book from the 1920s. The Jazz Age. This book will take you back to that age and time. A book about romance, class divide, and the ‘libertine.’

All the people you cheer for will die. And all the people who you don’t want to survive thrive! And yet, when you finish the book, the story will occupy your mind and heart for a long time. That is the impact of this book! 

I find it hard to avoid or even recognize the temptations that are inevitably attached to success. The excesses and immorality of the world he aspires to come back to bite Jay Gatsby when he becomes a victim of the vices he seeks to embrace.

All that glitters is not gold; in fact, gold is an irresistible snare that only those schooled in corruption can avoid. The pages of this book are filled with individual characters that jump off the page, but admirable traits are in short supply. Idealistic, romantic Gatsby himself is as close as we get to a… show more.

Some say that Gatsby is a critique of the corruption of the American dream and the careless rapacity of the Jazz Age. Sure. But who cares?

You love Gatsby because it is about the pursuit of a perfect love; the impossible longing to return to a more innocent, blameless past; and the tenderness of a man once Great brought to his knees by fate. It’s also about the guy who watches it all unfold. Nick Carraway, the unreliable narrator who lives in the little house beside Gatsby’s brilliant mansion, gets drawn into the romantic intrigue and reserves judgment as “a… show more.

Was the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic African-American?

A couple of academics have advanced that theory. I’m not sure I buy it. The notion (and supporting “evidence”) seems little more than a literary parlor game, not to mention the fact that nothing in Fitzgerald’s work or his letters shows a particular engagement with, or sympathy for, black Americans.

Still, it’s an interesting metaphor and the reason this seminal American novel appears in a list of what’s otherwise non-fiction. Gatsby’s yearning for his lost love could be an African-American yearning for a beloved country that does not always love… show more.

The centenary of what has been called James Joyce's "Great Irish Novel," Ulysess, was in 2022.

I realized then that the centenary of the “Great American Novel,” The Great Gatsby, was looming and further realized that F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is arguably the “Great Diasporic Irish Novel” too. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a Catholic from Maryland. F. Scott tended to stress family connections to the Maryland elite through his paternal grandfather’s marriage into the Anglo-American establishment Scott family.

Although Fitzgerald discussed the Irish ancestry that embarrassed him as being on his “potato famine Irish” mother’s side alone,… show more.

I couldn't leave this important book off this list, especially since my own novel is a refashioning of that story from the woman's point of view!

Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, is seen by many as an avatar for the American Dream of the quest for riches and status. But Jay Gatsby is also Scott himself—the man striving to be part of the in-crowd, who conflates wealth with class, and who never, ever gave up on his ultimate goal of reclaiming the great love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.

Short—it clocks it at barely 50,000 words, The Great… show more.

People usually recall The Great Gatsby being about yearning (the green light across the water) and the inaccessibility of the American dream. I recommend it for the yearning, but not Gatsby’s longing for Daisy—instead, read it with an eye to narrator Nick’s pining for Gatsby.

Nick’s awe of Gatsby’s stainless optimism is coupled with a dreadful disgust that Gatsby aspires to the vacuous, selfish, destructive lifestyle of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. In the end, the impression from Nick is that Gatsby is too good for this world and the ash heaps in it.

There’s a shocking chasm between the admiration… show more.

You can make a pretty convincing argument that one of the most celebrated books in American history is actually a mystery novel. 

You have all the requisite components: the femme fatale (Daisy), a murder victim (Myrtle), a shady rich man (Gatsby), and the narrator/amateur detective in Nick Carraway. The writing is gorgeous, but it’s the thick and juicy plot that drives these pages. This is the first novel I read in school that I actually liked!

I love this book for its multiple themes of unrequited love, racism, gender, class, even environment.

Fitzgerald's description of the view from a train moving through the ash fields of today's Flushing Meadows is, in my humble opinion, one of the most haunting in literature. I also love this book because it was a commercial failure. (Fitzgerald died never believing he was a success.)

Yet The Great Gatsby became one of those books we can't stop talking about. It's so rich and complex filmmakers have tried four times (and failed) to bring it to the screen. As if to underscore… show more.