The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

[MN Dave]

And so it begins... 

[DavidW]

Man I forgot.   Sorry I'm reading Ghost Road Blues.   Maybe I'll remember the next one.

[secondwind]

Well, I for one have actually done my homework!  I have been thinking of Gatsby as an extended illustration of the old adage that "The love of money is the root of all evil."  I also was thinking as I read the book this time that it would make great opera--has it ever been set as opera? 

[karlhenning]

By Boston composer John Harbison, actually.

[DavidW]

You know if this thread continues to move so slowly, I can read it tomorrow and jump in without missing a thing.  I think I'll do that.

[MN Dave]

Good plan. I just haven't had time to post much yet...

[karlhenning]

You know if this thread continues to move so slowly, I can read it tomorrow and jump in without missing a thing.  I think I'll do that.

Yes, I'm a catcher-up here, too.

[MN Dave]

[remember this month it's the turn of the screw...]

[secondwind]

By Boston composer John Harbison, actually.

Have you seen it?  Is it any good?

[secondwind]

You know if this thread continues to move so slowly, I can read it tomorrow and jump in without missing a thing.  I think I'll do that.

Yes, it's quite short--more like a novella than a novel.  Should be a quick read.

[Herman]

Three things. I seem to recall The Great Gatsby went through an extensive author-editor (the legendary Max Perkins, who also worked with Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe) process. As a result it one of those rare near-perfect novels. In today's literary marketplace nine out of ten editors (if not 10 / 10) would ask the author to 'flesh it out' a little more. The Great Gatsby was, even its day a rather slender book, and today a writer would seriously hamper his chances of success with a 50.000 words book. (Heft starts at 125.000)

The big masterstroke of The Great Gatsby is having this slightly off-center narrator, Nick Carraway (if I'm not mistaken  -  I haven't glanced at the book for years, though I used to consult it quite a lot formerly). The straight guy who observes the action. 'Maybe you ought to try a Carraway' has become writing seminar short hand for this type of narration.

The other great thing about this book is its imagery. A lot of Fitzgerald's work suffers from hackneyed, hastily conceived imagery. In this novel the writer gives his best.

[Joe Barron]

Have you seen it?  Is it any good?

It's OK, but the whole enterprise strikes me as kind of pointless. One reads Gatsby primarily for the beauty of the prose, which is, for me, untranslatable to another medium. I guess that's true of turning any great work of fiction onto a movie or an opera, but sme work better than others. The rule seems to be that the more workmanlike and plot-heavy the book, the better it works as something else.

Please don't load me up with counterexamples. It's not a discusson I'd care to have. I'm just saying I'd rather read Gatsby than watch a cinematic or operatic adaptation of it. OI'd say the same about Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury and the Bible.

Not so much with Dickens, who seems to make really good miniseries.

Are we supposed to be discussing the book in this thread? And if so, why hasn't MN Dave, who started the thread, bothered to say anything?

[MN Dave]

The prose is pretty amazing. I think I read somewhere Fitzgerald worked especially hard on it, and that's what you have to do to achieve something so relatively flawless, where it just flows with beauty. The length of the book is certainly rare for a classic. Not much space there to pussyfoot around. I'm assuming it evokes the era nicely. It wasn't popular in its time; I think it became so after the second world war. Perhaps people were nostalgic for the Roaring 20s.

[secondwind]

One of my favorite images in the book are the sightless eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, introduced early in chapter 2:

   But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.  The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their retinas are one yard high.  They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.  Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.  But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

So much is suggested by this image, which recurs at strategic moments in the book.  Here is commercialism as god--a god who has forgotten about his creation and moved on?  But the image is still visible, and still "watching" over the area around Wilson's garage.  After Myrtle's death, Wilson recounts to Michaelis his confrontation with Myrtle:

"I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God.  I took her to the window"--with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it--"and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.  You may fool me, but you can't fool God!'"
  Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.
  "God sees everything," repeated Wilson.
  "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him.

[Harpo]

A NC angle:
In 1936, when Fitzgerald was a burned-out alcoholic, he thought he had TB and went to Asheville NC to live at the well-known Grove Park Inn. This was apparently not a productive period in his life. He tried to sober up by switching from gin to beer--35 glasses a day, ending up broke and with DTs. In September 1936 the NY Post interviewed him while he was still in an alcoholic haze; when he read the article he tried to kill himself with an overdose of morphine. He soon went back to Hollywood.

Sonic and I have stayed at the Grove Park Inn several times. Once we had a room in the older building, and across the hall, with a plaque on the door, was the room where Fitzgerald stayed.

[CD]

One of my favorite images in the book are the sightless eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, introduced early in chapter 2:

   But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.  The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their retinas are one yard high.  They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.  Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.  But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

So much is suggested by this image, which recurs at strategic moments in the book.  Here is commercialism as god--a god who has forgotten about his creation and moved on?  But the image is still visible, and still "watching" over the area around Wilson's garage.  After Myrtle's death, Wilson recounts to Michaelis his confrontation with Myrtle:

"I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God.  I took her to the window"--with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it--"and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.  You may fool me, but you can't fool God!'"
  Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.
  "God sees everything," repeated Wilson.
  "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him.

Yes, I was going to cite exactly this.

[Harpo]

... I have been thinking of Gatsby as an extended illustration of the old adage that "The love of money is the root of all evil." 

Is Gatsby truly evil, malevolent? Or just a country boy with a distorted vision of success?

[owlice]

I'd say he's a ninny, but then, so are most of the main characters. I hate this book because the characters are so uniformly unlikeable (or at least, *I* didn't like them), with not an ounce of good sense or decency among them. For me, even the prose can't save it; elegantly-described ninnies are still ninnies!

Not that I have much of an opinion about this book....

[owlice]

That said, I do wave to F. Scott and Zelda whenever I drive past their final resting place, which is in Rockville, MD, overlooking an intersection.

[Joe Barron]

Well, this discussion is going nowhere ...