The Great Gatsby

More than a century after its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby still reads like a warning written in gold ink. It is a compact novel, and it holds one of the sharpest portraits of American longing ever written.

The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who rents a cottage on Long Island in the summer of 1922. His neighbour is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who throws lavish parties and seems to know no one at them. Gatsby turns out to be pursuing one goal: winning back Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin, whom he loved years before and who is now married to the wealthy, brutish Tom.

Fitzgerald’s great achievement is the gap between how things look and what they are. Gatsby’s mansion, shirts, and parties are all built to impress one woman, and his whole identity is something he invented. Nick narrates with a mix of admiration and disgust, which lets the reader feel both the romance of Gatsby’s dream and how hollow it is. The famous green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is one of literature’s best symbols: always visible, never reachable.

The prose is the main reason to read the book. Fitzgerald writes sentences that shimmer and then cut. The parties dazzle, the valley of ashes between the city and the suburbs is grim, and the final pages, about the past pulling us back, rank among the finest closing passages in English.

The novel isn’t flawless. Daisy is drawn more as an idea than a person, and the women in the book generally get less depth than the men. A modern reader will also notice the casual prejudices of Tom and his class. Fitzgerald intends Tom to be ugly, but the book doesn’t always step back from the attitudes of its time.

Still, what lingers is the book’s moral clarity. The rich, careless characters break things and retreat into their money while others pay. Gatsby, a bootlegger and a fraud, ends up the most sympathetic figure because he actually believed in something.