11/13/2023 0 Comments Gatsby shady business page![]() Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired-fortune, mansion, entire persona-is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick’s cousin. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. So since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them-but not this book. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation. I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing-in the face of real effort and sincere intentions-to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience. There are a small number of novels I return to again and again: Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, maybe a half-dozen others. The fourth was last month, in advance of seeing the new film adaptation the fifth, last week. The third was in my mid-twenties, stuck in a remote bus depot in Peru with someone’s left-behind copy. The first was in high school the second, in college. In response, he offered up the closest thing to a beatific smile I have ever seen on the face of a book critic. The week we were to read Gertrude Stein’s notoriously challenging Tender Buttons, one student raised her hand and asked-bravely, I thought-if Menand had any advice about how best to approach it. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard. The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand.
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