Why You Shouldn't Read the Great Gatsby
It'southward been 89 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald'south Jazz Age masterpiece, The Nifty Gatsby, was published. Since then it'due south been read and revered by millions who've been captivated by the glittery, tragic tale of Jay Gatsby and his elusive dearest, Daisy Buchanan. One of those is Maureen Corrigan, 59, the volume critic for NPR'south Fresh Air. Corrigan, who lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at Georgetown Academy, spoke with U.s. TODAY'due south Jocelyn McClurg about her new book, So Nosotros Read On: How The Peachy Gatsby Came To Exist and Why It Endures (Picayune, Dark-brown).
Q: You boldly state that The Great Gatsby isn't but the great American novel. It's the "greatest," you lot say. What's the No. one reason why?
A: The language. I call back it'due south a novel that takes ordinary American language and makes information technology unearthly. The story that it tells of somebody trying to be better, trying to be greater, trying to be more is certainly a story we identify as an American story. It's the way Fitzgerald tells information technology that just takes your jiff away.
Q: You've read the novel about 50 times. Why is it a book that can be read over and over?
A: Every time I read it I notice something new in it. Sometimes it'due south because a student volition point out something that somehow weirdly I take not noticed earlier. Years ago a educatee said, in terms of the drowning imagery, everybody in the novel is drinking themselves to decease, they're drowning themselves in liquor. And my jaw dropped open. It's so obsessively designed, you get tons of symbols on every page. And yet as Jonathan Franzen said, information technology'southward similar swallowing whipped cream, you can read it and non notice so much of that stuff.
Q: What about Gatsby particularly resonates with contemporary readers?
A: That sense of the poor male child trying to remake himself, aiming for the stars. I read that Nib Gates has a quote from The Bang-up Gatsby in his mansion exterior of Seattle, and I thought, of class he does. That notion that you're Mister Nobody from nowhere, and all of a sudden y'all rise upward out of the crowd and you're special. Simply it's also the pathos of the story. Perhaps you tin can rise up for a fiddling while just you're going to be pulled down once again, inevitably, by your ain past, by the weight of your dreams, by fate. If it were merely a success story it wouldn't touch people equally deeply as it does.
Q: Why didn't you lot didn't similar Gatsby when you lot first read information technology in loftier schoolhouse?
A: I thought it was a boring novel near rich people. I was in high schoolhouse, so I was stupid, right? I grew up in a blueish-collar part of Queens. I call up when we beginning reading, particularly equally teenagers, we're reading to see ourselves in books, and boy there was nobody in Gatsby who I really identified with. It wasn't until I got to grad school and had to start teaching it and re-read it that I started to fall under its spell. I started to identify with Nick (Carraway, the narrator), that vocalism of longing and regret.
Q: Is in that location an ideal age to read Gatsby?
A: At that place's a Gatsby for every age. If I ran the world, I'd say 40. But information technology's not lost on the young. Information technology's a dissimilar Gatsby for them, but information technology's a skilful one. It's a younger Gatsby that's full of excitement and emotion and yearning.
Q: Part of its charm and appeal, you say, is its brevity.
A: Of course that'south function of the reason it's assigned in high schoolhouse, too. Fitzgerald was a poet; he revered Keats, Shakespeare. He wrote like a poet. It makes sense that information technology would exist brusque. He could pack so much into a couple of lines, a couple of paragraphs. I think the fact that information technology's short just makes it this intense, streamlined powerhouse of a novel. He was best at short stories, and Gatsby as a brusque novel really was his masterpiece, maybe in part because it was brusk.
Q: You lot call Baz Luhrmann's adaptation a "silly champagne bubble of a film." I guess you lot didn't like information technology.
A: I liked the spectacle of it, the spectacle of wild wretched excess of the 1920s. But I thought Luhrmann really shortchanged the class anxieties and class criticism in the novel. Fitzgerald wanted money, he wanted to alive high, and he also read Marx. He's a guy who's e'er got ambiguity about everything he wants. The rich are held up and the rich are also regarded with contempt in this novel.
Q: The Great Gatsby was forgotten when Fitzgerald died in 1940. Then GIs in World War II rescued information technology when it was chosen for the Armed Services editions program.
A: It's astonishing that Gatsby was chosen. My all-time educated estimate is that the managing director of the Scribner bookstore who served on the pick committee was responsible. It was nowhere. Fitzgerald couldn't fifty-fifty become it before his death when he would go effectually in Hollywood with his girlfriend Sheila Graham and endeavor to buy his books in bookstores. A lot of the bookstore owners thought he was dead. And of course the books weren't on the shelf.
Q: Would Fitzgerald now accept to disagree with his famous line, "There are no second acts in American lives?"
A: Was that e'er wrong. I recall he would have loved the money, he would have loved the fame. He knew he had written a masterpiece, and it tortured him that information technology wasn't recognized. He would have been profoundly moved by how fundamental Gatsby is to American culture.
Q: Why do you similar to visit Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Physician.?
A: The grave of Scott and (his wife) Zelda is covered over with a slab that has the last words of The Great Gatsby written on it. ("And so nosotros trounce on, boats confronting the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.") I beloved to become there considering I love to read those words. I sentimentally I like to say, "You did information technology, you wrote the bang-up American novel," and offer that up equally a kind of prayer to Fitzgerald. And I also like to run across what people get out at that place. They leave liquor bottles and coins and sometimes they get out their own manuscripts, costume jewelry. It's a miniature shrine for people who know it's there.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/09/10/the-great-gatsby-maureen-corrigan-and-we-read-on/15306163/
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