Careless People
High school was all about the journey. Every book represented what Joseph Campbell referred to as the Hero’s Journey.
The list included The Odyssey, Animal Farm, Hamlet, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, Invisible Man, Oedipus Rex, Julius Caesar, and Native Son. A highlight of this era was my stint as stage manager on a production of As You Like It, which brought Shakespeare’s language to life
Then there was Gatsby.
There’s something about it -- I just read it for the fourth time since ninth grade -- and what stuns me is that it never disappoints.
Gatsby is such a short work, clocking in at 182 pages, and it reads like a novella. I am a huge fan of this form, and in fact my novel, One Way to Whitefish, began life as one. Until friends convinced me I was wrong.
What is extraordinary about Gatsby is what Fitzgerald manages to pack in those pages. For one thing, the period of time is rather short – one summer – and therefore lends itself to the kind of casual storytelling one might have with a friend.
In addition, Nick’s insider-yet-outside-observer narration, as opposed to a third-person perspective, gives an added storytelling feature to the narrative: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled…”
Fitzgerald’s gift for language, what one scholar referred to as his “breathtaking lyricism” is what captivates me. As scholar James L. W. West III writes: “I was struck anew by the beauty of the language in the novel. Fitzgerald had a pitch-perfect ear. Some of those passages—Daisy and Jordan floating on the sofa, Nick woozy with drink in Myrtle’s apartment, Gatsby smiling down on his guests—these are unforgettable.”
In the end, I find Gatsby to be a lush, all-encompassing sensory experience. Why, for example, do I keep returning to the shirt scene over and over? Perhaps it is because Nick’s view of Gatsby’s unattainable world is (just as Gatsby’s view of Daisy’s is, when he first meets her) measured in suits, dresses, marble and music. Consider the scene when teatime is over and Gatsby tells Nick “I want you and Daisy to come over to my house…I’d like to show her around.” Highlights of the tour include:
“Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down to the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky…the frothy odor of…pale gold kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees…”
and
“…he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high…he took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
I loved listening to The Great Gatsby at 100, an extraordinary exploration of Fitzgerald’s “complex view of money and class” by Professor Sheila Liming, of Champlain College. I highly recommend it.