"...And one fine morning--"

The Great Gatsby by Jon Stewart and the Daily Show Writers as told to F. Scott Fitzgerald*

Next up in my continuing series of re-read books that I read in high school and didn’t understand**: The Great Gatsby.

*Yes! Obscure allusions tag!

**Well, I guess as far as you’re concerned this is the first in said series because I haven’t mentioned it before. The others I’ve re-read so far are To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved by Toni Morrison. I highly recommend starting your own version of this because it’s really eye-opening. In that time, I’ve also read Nabokov's Lolita. Right now I’m re-reading Ibsen’s “A Doll House.” I’ll get around to reviews of all of them sooner or later.

First let me say that I’m basically going to write this assuming you’ve already read the book. So if you haven’t(probably only a couple of you) and you don’t want to know the plot you may want to avoid this. That said, plot has very little to do with enjoyment of the book, and I liked it a hundred times better this time even though I knew what was going to happen.

Okay, so onward! I’m about to throw about some ridiculously huge phrases, so if that scares you, you can stop now. Still here? Okay, here it goes: I think The Great Gatsby is the greatest piece of art I have ever encountered.

That’s right, you read what I said. Look, I’m sure Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and (especially) Shakespeare will have something to say about this before it’s all done. But for now, nothing equals Gatsby in my eyes--not Abbey Road, not Highway 61, not Macbeth*, not Network not Swann’s Way.

*Don’t make fun of my choice of Shakespeare, okay? I’ve only read Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth, alright? Like I said, I’m sure Billy boy will have plenty more to say about this as I read nine freaking plays of his next year.

Fitzgerald is a master at seeing the poetic in life. Gatsby isn’t an extended prose poem, but clocking in at only about 40,000 words (extremely short for a novel) and filled with poetic imagery, it’s not that far off. What I’ve noticed a lot recently in doing my own writing is that when symbols are good, they are not contrived. Life is absolutely full of symbols, you just have to be able to see them. This is the thing that Fitzgerald captured—he sees some defining characteristic of a culture or character (Gatsby’s need of Daisy and a past that no longer exists) and then sees how that gets expressed in the minute (reaching his arms for the green light).

Having said that, Fitzgerald is no slouch at plotting or characterization either. It’s particularly remarkable that in a 40,000 word work he’s able to have you feel like you know the characters so intimately. When you think about it, you really don’t spend that much time wit Gatsby, and you barely spend any with Daisy or Tom or Jordan. And yet you barely even notice this lack because Fitzgerald, like all great writers, can tell you almost everything about a character in a few short moments. Like, for instance, this passage at Nick's first meeting with Daisy in East Egg:

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm so sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening bad been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Now, you may say, "Sam, I thought you didn't like art that had no hope." I have said this, more or less, but I no longer think it's true. I don't know exactly how to explain what I was trying to get at by saying that before, but I think it's something like this: I don't demand a happy ending or hope, I only demand vitality and emotional depth. That doesn't mean there have to be a lot of emotional confrontations--in fact, if you can show me the inner lives of the characters without forcing them to actually say what's going on, as Fitzgerald does with a few exceptions (such as: --"You can't bring back the past" --"Of course, you can!" (paraphrased)), then all the better. What I have a hard time liking are stories that I would call empty, like No Country for Old Men and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I'm having trouble putting my finger on exactly what "empty" means for me, but that's what I have for now.

Before I end this, I'll say one more thing. As you may know, I write a lot (fiction) and hope to one day be able to do it for a living. If I already gave Fitzgerald the highest praise I could possibly give, then I'll now give the next highest: if I could write like any person I have read, it would be F. Scott Fitzgerald. I want to sound like him and make you feel like Walt Whitman does. For me, Fitzgerald's writing has now become the gold standard against which I will always measure my own.

Now, I will leave you with a few lines you probably know, which I consider some of the finest sentences ever written:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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 one fine morning--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Picture from Yale.edu via Google