Gatsby Is Still Great

One of the greatest of my recent pleasures was revisiting a classic novel from the past and finding it to be just as wonderfully written as I remembered. I read three of Shakespeare's plays with my daughter this summer, but none gave me as much enjoyment as rereading The Great Gatsby with her did.

We read much of it aloud and had to stop often to savor a particularly perfect phrase or laugh at F. Scott Fitzgerald's crisp wit. Lily and I were impressed by his ability to produce an indelible image of a character in just a few words, by how swiftly the story moved along, and by how much we hated to put the book down. We talked several times about the irony of his keen insights into the shallowness of those who lived only for booze and parties, since Fitzgerald himself was famous for drinking himself into a stupor and hosting wild parties that lasted for days with his charming and intelligent but ultimately unstable wife, Zelda. We wondered how he could skewer the excesses of decadent party people in such potent and eviscerating words and yet have spent so much of is own brief life living just as those characters did, ultimately drinking his health away by his thirties and dying of a heart attack at 44.

My mother taught Gatsby to her high school English classes for 37 years and never tired of it, and she referred to the novel often at home until it, like a few dozen other classics, felt like an old friend at our house. Phrases and images from it peppered our conversations as far back as I can remember. Such an old reliable work of literature it seemed to me that I was surprised to find it so fresh and pungent when I read it again this summer. What power Gatsby's yearning still has for me! How compellingly it drew me and my daughter in, making us hunger to know the characters better, making us want to move in closer to gawk at Gatsby's world while at the same time wanting to turn away and not see the sad underpinnings of his desire, not wanting to crowd him or use him for our pleasure as nearly everyone else in the book did, with hardly a thank you or a backward glance.

The arrogance inherent in the present helps us to believe that we are inventing a crisp, unstoppable modernity right now, this minute, that the past is stale and only today is fresh. But so much recent novel writing strikes me as mannered, stifling and overworked, even old fashioned in its preciousness, posturing and desire to shock. Fitzgerald's masterpiece, published in 1925, feels more modern and lively than almost anything I've read in the past decade.