The Great Gatsby: Review

I don't quite get why The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is billed as possibly "the Greatest American Classic."  [Personally, my vote goes to To Kill a Mockingbird.] Honestly, it's a fairly decent read.  It's a pretty darn quick read (5 hours--including time to work in there).  Fitzgerald has a way with words...mostly. There are times when I tripped over some of his adjectives-- "dilatory" limousine comes to mind (how exactly is a limousine "dilatory"???).  But he had plenty of interesting passages that just seemed have flowed right out of his pen (off his typewriter?) and I gleaned all kinds of quotes (as you'll see below).  And, yeah, I get that he's given us a nice little slice of the Jazz Age--people showing up to parties they haven't been invited to, drinking like fish, playing at being best friends with people whose names they don't even know, making free with Gatsby's house and servants and liquor cabinet and pool.  Generally representing the wild, Roaring Twenties.  I get the whole Gatsby and Daisy representing the disillusioned youth and the emptiness of the American Dream thing.  After all, none of those gate-crashers (or even folks who claimed to be Gatsby's pals) bothered to show up for him in the end.  Well....none but the narrator and the owl-eyed, unnamed man.

Admittedly, I was a bit saddened by the ending, nice and tragic and just a bit pointless (in a pointed way, you know)....but I didn't really care about Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and the Wilsons the way I imagine I was supposed to...and the way I thought I would given the first half of the novel.  Just when FSF had started to build up my interest in this mysterious Gatsby character (about whom nobody really knows anything), he lost me. Maybe that's because our narrator, Nick, seems pretty disconnected from it all.  If the man representing our "eyes" in this world is so removed from the characters, then it's difficult to get deeply involved with them.

Oh, and spoiler here, but how the heck did Mrs. Wilson escape from the rooms over the garage in order to get killed?  Last we heard of her, she was locked in--for two more days or so.  Loved that she suddenly was out--just in time to get run over and help propel us to that depressing ending.  The least FSF could have done is explain what she's doing out of the room.  Don't just say, "Hey, you know what, I need to wrap this book up now and somebody's gotta die because I've got this depressing ending planned.  Let's make it Mrs. Wilson." Poof, she's running out in the road now.

Final analysis: Decent read, but totally overrated as the uber-classic of American Lit.  I'm willing to agree that it represents an Age--but I'm not convinced that it deserves superstar status based on that alone. Three stars--mostly for writing style.

Quotes:

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.  I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (p. 35)

A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. (p. 43)

We all turned an looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculations he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. (p. 44)

USMM: I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
JB: Has it?
USMM: A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet.  I've only been here an hour.
[Unnamed, stout, middle-aged man; Jordan Baker] (p. 46)

I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound. (p. 47)

...I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy. [Jordan Baker] (p. 49)

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people I have ever known. [narrator] (p. 58)

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind they don't see or care. [Jordan Baker] (p. 77)

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. (p. 79)

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. (p. 85)

...there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. (p. 89)

When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air. (p. 108)

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.... (p. 125)

...it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end. (p. 164)

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. [Wolfsheim] (p. 172)