Have you heard of this book that sucks? It's called The Great Gatsby

I was also at Gatsby's big parties. I also hung out with Gatsby, with Meyer, with all those guys. I knew him way better than Nick did.

Okay, like who does this Nick guy think he is, thinking he can tell this big story about the American dream using my friends that I knew way better than he did? This snob, Nick Carraway, from a rich family, who's not from around, not like me and Gatsby.

This rich asshole comes and tells a story about Gatsby and suddenly that's the story everybody knows? That some guy tells just because he's rich, like his attention suddenly matters more, and is more meaningful attention to somebody we all knew?

This guy, Nick, is going around town telling people about Gatsby and how he'd stare at the green light, because he was hung up on the girl next door.

That's Gatsby's story? That he was hung up on some girl? Can you imagine, twenty, thirty, forty years later, that's the story people tell about you? And basically the story is just some rich guy noticed you were pathetic? Am I missing something: Is that the story? Isn't that the story?

You know, there's more to this story. Like, Gatsby had friends. He had friends who listened to him talk for hours about that girl, Daisy, and we didn't think it was absurd. We agreed with the plan, to throw big parties and get her attention. It was a good frigging plan.

And yeah, yeah, these complexities are already present already in the book. It's all in the book, The Great Gatsby. It's got all that pathos, all that grandeur. That's what people say.

But you know what it's missing? Me! Gatsby's friend. His real goddamn friend. Not just some rich asshole who came in last minute like these guys always do, to swoop away whatever you think is great.

And that's why I made lots and lots of money, and I've been throwing big parties, and everybody who wants to be a part of them has got to hear me talk about how the The Great Gatsby sucks. And I know they don't agree with me. But guess what? I've got the money now.

Except you know the problem is...I kinda feel like these guys are just humoring me. I mean I knew they would. I knew they wouldn't take it totally seriously. But these guys, I thought they'd at least consider the idea that The Great Gatsby sucks. But I don't think they care at all. A lot of people don't even have opinions about The Great Gatsby. They're like why are you still hung up on this book from a zillion years ago. You've got money, you could be doing anything other than getting hung up on this book. But you know what? Screw them, and screw this book, which I've never read, but which I can assure you completely sucks.

I mean sometimes after these parties I just go and pull out my copy of that freaking book, with all those lights on the cover, and I think…I really liked that frigging guy! I liked those parties! And I feel like, you know, like…like why are mine not the same? I did everything Gatsby did, but it’s just…it’s not the same. When I was with him, I felt so alive, so full of happiness, but now it’s just…it’s all different. It’s tough. I dunno—I keep trying to turn my life into something like those times, but somehow I just get pushed away and can't never make my way to anyplace great.

Gatsby after one hundred years

The Great Gatsby does not suck! It’s one of my favorite 20th-century novels. But I was informed by

Ross Barkan

recently that it’s the 100th anniversary of the publication of the book: it came out on April 10th, 1925. So I wrote this little piece in its honor. The Metropolitan Review has been doing several good posts. I particularly liked John Pistelli’s, where I learned several new things, like the fact that Fitzgerald would not necessarily have conceptualized himself as an heir to Hawthorne and Poe. That, for his generation, American literary history really began with Mark Twain and Henry James. Not something I knew!

To read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned today is to be reminded that the American canon was not yet fixed in the early 20th century. For American writers who came of age in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, like Wharton, Mencken, and Fitzgerald, the standard of fiction remained British and French realism with its anti-Romantic bias, while 19th-century American Romantic literature was, as Mencken himself complained in his essays and reviews, the work of genteel and sheltered Boston Brahmins like Emerson and Hawthorne or else weird mystics speaking a private idiom like Poe and Whitman, not writers willing and able to respond to the social scene. Only the robustly comic and gritty realism of Mark Twain, said Mencken, could compare with the work of British and European masters. Wharton, meanwhile, in her 1925 treatise The Writing of Fiction, counseled the budding writer that the modern novel was essentially a fusion of French psychological analysis with English social comedy; among American precursors, she lauded only her friend Henry James (she dismissed Poe and Hawthorne as “belong[ing] to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition”). On Mencken’s and Wharton’s theories, fiction should be realistic, not the symbolic and prose-poetic romance favored by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. By this standard, great American fiction began as late as the 1880s with the divergent realisms, plebeian and patrician respectively, of Twain and James. In this atmosphere, we can understand why the young Fitzgerald subjected the romantic yearning (and Romantic visionary drive) of his first two protagonists to a scornful irony — really more of a mannered and facile sarcasm — derived from British and French realists.

Amazed that John able to synthesize and explain all this somewhat coherently—I’ve read Wharton’s book on writing fiction, but I’d never have been able to contextualize her advice within literary history the way that John does.

I wrote a post earlier this year about being forced to close-read The Great Gatsby, and TMR also has a post, by Emma Heath, on the subject.¹

Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby

1. The TMR post dutifully references my own post on Gatsby—something I appreciate, but don’t expect.