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"...an extraordinary gift for hope..."
"... a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again." That's Nick Carraway describing Jay Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's novel is one I return to year after year. His writing is so sublime that individual sentences still stop me cold in their elegance and I have to read through them again. Even if set in the summer of 1922, "The Great Gatsby" is timeless in its understanding of conflicting responses to the promises offered by America, its call to individual idealism and the possibilities it holds of making a fast buck. We know which of these, when brought into competition, will prevail and how ruthlessly.
In the book's final paragraphs, as Carraway prepares to leave the East, he walks down to Long Island shore, behind Gatsby's darkened mansion, and has a transcendent vision of the New World. "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
Let me add, without such poetry, the best book I've read in recent years follows a somewhat similar theme of rags-to-riches-to-defeat, this time told as a true story of one man's land speculation, entry into national politics and rapid downfall in the years after the American Revolution. "William Cooper's Town," by Alan Taylor, follows the life of James Fenimore Cooper's father, the man who created Cooperstown, N.Y. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1996. I recommend it to everyone.
By
Gustav Niebuhr
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June 24, 2008; 10:10 AM ET
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Posted by: Daniel in the Lion's Den | June 25, 2008 4:42 PM
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I like the Great Gatsby, too. I too find F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing to be very beautiful, and I do not believe any American has written as well since.
Alot of people think that the movie with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford was not very good. But, actually it was a pretty good movie, just not as good as the book. But how could it be? The book is so good, not because of the plot, which is not bad, and not because of the characters, also, whom are not bad, but the book is so good because the actual flow of the writing is so lyricallly beautiful, and they can't take that out of a book and put it into a movie.
We read it in school, when I was in the 11th grade. Nothing could have been more far-removed from the interests of my day to day life: New York City rich people in the 1920's. But I read it again, later, when I was all grown up, and had been cuffed around by life, and it made alot more sense, and is just about one of my favorite books.