> The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In 2014, by then a published author in his 40s, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until 2021 to publish it.
WTf? Can't write an original spin off on some nearly hundred year old thing, without brushing with copyright law?
Today, we tend to see The Great Gatsby as a work of historical literature, as it gives a window into the Roaring Twenties. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald did not set out to depict the past; he was depicting his own present. Similarly, Proust's literature is seen as a window into the French high-society of the Belle Epoque, a society in which Proust lived.
Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
This article ends up seeming like an ad for some dubious derivations of the original novel.
- "Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory."
- "Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips
the genders to feature a female Jay Gatsby and a male Danny Buchanan."
- "And Claire Anderson-Wheeler's The Gatsby Gambit is a murder mystery which invents a younger sister for Fitzgerald's eponymous anti-hero: Greta Gatsby – get it?"
I always enjoyed D’Angelo Barksdale’s interpretation from The Wire:
> D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.
> And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make him different is that he say it. But it ain’t the truth. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And because he wasn't willing to get real with the story, it caught up to him."
> Inmate: "So you're saying he couldn't get over?"
> D’Angelo: "No, I’m saying he was who he was. They found him out. They found him out in the end. And that’s what it is. You can’t get over. You can’t even get out."
This is a very confused article, I think. The fact that people associate these extravagant roaring 20s parties with the character of Gatsby has everything to do with his character and over-the-top parties being the strongest cultural touchstone that people today have with that era, given that almost all of us (in the US at least) have to read it in high school.
The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.
This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
Morris has written some of my favorite long-form New York Times pieces, ("Willie Nelson's Long Encore", "Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?", ), and he has the novelist Min Jin Lee and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, as guests on the podcast to talk about why they regularly re-read Gatsby.
Min Jin Lee talks about how amazing the craft of the novel is (beyond the obvious greatness of the sentence-by-sentence writing).
A couple of months ago I was in New York and found a new cyberpunk re-telling of Gatsby called Local Heavens. A fun read if you like Fitzgerald, or re-imaginings of famous novels, or cyberpunk.
I hate this sentiment. The book isn't "about" a thing in particular, neither does it "mean" any specific thing. It may have been written with some ideas in mind, and there may even be overt indications as to those ideas. Everyone has their own relationship with each and every piece of art, and may sometimes choose to include the artist and/or their intentions, but may also choose to exclude them.
The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!
I think the 2013 movie unfortunately has made the book into the symbol of the roaring 1920s era, and that comes with a lot of baggage that Fitzgerald didn’t intend to put center stage. I can’t think of any other mainstream media that is also set in the 20s and has as big of a cultural pull. So everything 1920s related gets crammed into Gatsby, when in reality it’s more of a fable on American identity.
My interest in literature lies at the intersection with politics and society.
I resonate with the principle that art asks questions. In decades and centuries past, art was particularly important to the masses to question society at a time when that was often forbidden, forcing the use of metaphors. Literature, plays, opera and so on.
So a result of this is that as a general rule conservative political movements cannot produce art because they don't want people to ask questions. They want to give them answers that they take unquestionably in a similar way to how religious dogma is propagated.
So you see how fascist movements, most notably the Third Reich, have treated art and have sought "objective" beauty in an acceptable aesthetic and have denounced actual art as degenerate, even subversive, leading to such terms as "cultural Bolshevism".
So I see the Great Gatsby as questioning the very society of the Roaring Twenties where you might otherwise see it more superficially as simply depicting that era. It's historically noteworthy that it was released in 1925, well before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was (IMHO) the inevitable consequence of an era of great inequality where wealth was accumulated, even then, through financialization. Lest we forget Nick was a bond salesman.
And on top of this system we have Tom and Daisy who are essentially parasitic, who float through life with no regard for the consequences of their actions, who produce and give back nothing in spite of their wealth and status. Other, most notably Gatsby himself, pay the price for their reckless disregard.
I first read the Great Gatsby before the dot-com bust but it seems like you can draw many parallels with the post-GFC tech boom. This is why, for me at least, the Great Gatsby is inherently anti-capitalist.
Personally, aside from Russian literature, I now prefer American literature, which I think is underestimated in China. I really like that film adaptation, but what the film expresses is something else, not the same as the novel’s core theme.
My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe(or other countries). One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land. Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle. The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
I think this kind of contradiction is expressed most clearly in American literature and is also most worth articulating within the American cultural context. This is because its commodity economy and social transformation have been too successful, and it lacks the kind of historical entanglements that Europe has to dilute these problems. As a result, this sense of emptiness stands out even more sharply and demands a more urgent response.
I don’t know if there are horror films like this, but I once saw something similar in the TV series WandaVision. She creates an illusion in which she and Vision are a standard middle-class couple, well-fed and well-clothed, with the visuals in black and white. This made it feel like a horror story to me. Why? Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
Of course, I don’t think that America’s secular success means it has no spiritual world; rather, the former has been so successful that the latter has been greatly neglected. The purpose of American literature should be to depict, under the success of this commodity economy, what people’s inner lives have actually become, and what they ought to pursue. This, to me, is its most distinctive quality.
There are some subtleties in Gatsby that most people miss, and isn't even addressed in the article.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) is probably Jewish.
Nick Carraway is probably gay, but at least bisexual.
Both of these traits forced people into lower castes this era in high-status society. To me the lens of the book is repeatedly the failure of "if only I can win them over" slowly becoming the unsatisfying "these people were always assholes." Whether it's parties, a potential spouse, or important friends, the entire concept of class structure is poison. If people are good people, it shouldn't matter how they present themselves... that's just what I've always taken away from it. It seems like a theme that someone with Fitzgerald's background would want to convey, especially someone with that background who enjoined the company of people like Hemingway. And I think that's been a theme of American culture since reconstruction.
No wonder Gatsby is frequently misunderstood: Most people won't have the experience needed to understand it until they're in their 30s, but we prescribe it for high schoolers year after year.
While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional.
This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read it literally, or just get bored of books in general. On one hand, I admire the fact that great books are read by young people (something which isn't true in my country), but I wonder whether it ends up being counterproductive.
Adaptations running away from the main story to focus overtly on stuff that attracts the audience instead of being faithful to the crux of the source material doesn't help either.
I completely agree. To this day it still drives me crazy that people think Animal Farm is about communism being bad, instead of what it was trying to warn us about authoritarianism and propaganda.
I found my German curriculum to be a lot worse at this. Basically zero books I read in German classes that I liked, compared to most of the "classics" in English lessons I all found ok to good. Maybe because some were more accessible or at least relatable or closer to my interests, but we're talking about educating teenagers here. (E.g. Animal Farm, 1984, Poe, Shakespeare (quite some overlap to what people read in their native English)) vs ... I don't even know which of the ones we read are known to an international audience...
Some of them are also just badly written, like The Scarlet Letter - the impression that stuck with me was it took way too long to get to the point, so much so that the second half of the book contained needed context for the first half to have any meaning at all.
And I was one of the few who got it when we read it. I don't think anyone I knew realized the movie Easy A shared any themes with that book, but it was just so much better done they understood the relevant themes from it.
Americans are often shocked when they reread the classics in their 40s. But that's one of the nice parts of the classics - you get something very different from them depending on where you are in life.
I completely agree. Even if I was able to understand the story and appreciate the prose in middle school, I can see looking back that I lacked the life experience to appreciate a lot of the undertones and unspoken themes.
I distinctly remember being completely bewildered when we read "Hills Like White Elephants" [1] and our teacher told us it was about an abortion, and ultimately about commitment and relationships and the ungraspable decision points that define a life. I remember rereading the text, not finding those words anywhere, and being confused about how a man and woman having a halting conversation at a train stop might have possibly given her that takeaway. But now of course it's achingly obvious.
Jane Austen similarly passed me by in high school. I needed to understand women a lot better before Pride & Prejudice started to make sense.
Even still when I read the classics, there are some where I can appreciate the themes but which are too abstract to me for them to resonate. The difference from when I was young is that now I can tell that there's more story waiting to be told once I've lived more life. Maybe in another 20 years.
I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
Fitzgerald's style is a pretty linear development out of early Joyce, say Dubliners and the first episodes of Ulysses. It compares to Woolf and McCarthy just fine.
Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise:
So
Walter Arensberg,
Alfred Kreymborg,
Carl Sandburg,
Louis Untermeyer,
Eunice Tietjens,
Clara Shanafelt,
James Oppenheim,
Maxwell Bodenheim,
Richard Glaenzer,
Scharmel Iris,
Conrad Aiken,
I place your names here
So that you may live
If only as names,
Sinuous, mauve-colored names,
In the Juvenalia
Of my collected editions.
I remember reading a take that Gasby could be read as mixed race, and that gives the story another dimension. (Probably unintended as the plain reading. But the absence of descriptors for Jay Gatsby alone implies this might have been something Fitzgerald toyed with.)
The meaning of "The Lord of the Rings" would be something like that: if you somehow got some dark skill (say, you're a good liar) then the only way to save you from becoming a slave of the Dark Lord is to get rid of that skill. You cannot use that skill "for good", because each time you do that the Dark Lord gets closer. The journey would be long and even if you manage to get to the end, it may still be hard to lose that skill: it is a part of you and losing it would be as easy as losing a finger.
Now let's see how we understand that meaning. Oh! We play endless sessions of Dungeons & Dragons! Here's a sword +4 and here's a cursed shield -2!
It's a high school book I believe and in my experience that tends to alienate a lot of people. I don't know whether school children have the life experience to understand the Great Gatsby.
The admiration some readers have for Jay Gatsby (even though he’s meant to be a tragic figure) reminds me of how some currently view the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho as aspirational (minus the murder). I think America values success and beauty so dearly that it can override better judgement in cases.
Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
This article is infuriating. The most misunderstood? Of all novels? Are we sure? Why not call it a “very misunderstood” novel?
The entire article is a maze of ideas, explaining very little in the end. Okay, it’s misunderstood by young readers, people who think the latest movie adaptation looks cool, and so on.
That’s it? You don’t think The Catcher in the Rye and Dracula were even more misunderstood? I don’t get what the BBC columnist is getting at here. I’ve re-read the novel and it does ‘feel’ different when you’re older, but it never conveyed that the 20s were cool and parties were awesome back then. Ach!
35 comments
[ 15.2 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadWTf? Can't write an original spin off on some nearly hundred year old thing, without brushing with copyright law?
Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
- "Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory."
- "Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips the genders to feature a female Jay Gatsby and a male Danny Buchanan."
- "And Claire Anderson-Wheeler's The Gatsby Gambit is a murder mystery which invents a younger sister for Fitzgerald's eponymous anti-hero: Greta Gatsby – get it?"
> D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.
> And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make him different is that he say it. But it ain’t the truth. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And because he wasn't willing to get real with the story, it caught up to him."
> Inmate: "So you're saying he couldn't get over?"
> D’Angelo: "No, I’m saying he was who he was. They found him out. They found him out in the end. And that’s what it is. You can’t get over. You can’t even get out."
The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.
This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/our-last-chance-to-tal...
Morris has written some of my favorite long-form New York Times pieces, ("Willie Nelson's Long Encore", "Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?", ), and he has the novelist Min Jin Lee and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, as guests on the podcast to talk about why they regularly re-read Gatsby.
Min Jin Lee talks about how amazing the craft of the novel is (beyond the obvious greatness of the sentence-by-sentence writing).
A couple of months ago I was in New York and found a new cyberpunk re-telling of Gatsby called Local Heavens. A fun read if you like Fitzgerald, or re-imaginings of famous novels, or cyberpunk.
https://kmfajardo.com/local-heavens/
The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!
I resonate with the principle that art asks questions. In decades and centuries past, art was particularly important to the masses to question society at a time when that was often forbidden, forcing the use of metaphors. Literature, plays, opera and so on.
So a result of this is that as a general rule conservative political movements cannot produce art because they don't want people to ask questions. They want to give them answers that they take unquestionably in a similar way to how religious dogma is propagated.
So you see how fascist movements, most notably the Third Reich, have treated art and have sought "objective" beauty in an acceptable aesthetic and have denounced actual art as degenerate, even subversive, leading to such terms as "cultural Bolshevism".
So I see the Great Gatsby as questioning the very society of the Roaring Twenties where you might otherwise see it more superficially as simply depicting that era. It's historically noteworthy that it was released in 1925, well before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was (IMHO) the inevitable consequence of an era of great inequality where wealth was accumulated, even then, through financialization. Lest we forget Nick was a bond salesman.
And on top of this system we have Tom and Daisy who are essentially parasitic, who float through life with no regard for the consequences of their actions, who produce and give back nothing in spite of their wealth and status. Other, most notably Gatsby himself, pay the price for their reckless disregard.
I first read the Great Gatsby before the dot-com bust but it seems like you can draw many parallels with the post-GFC tech boom. This is why, for me at least, the Great Gatsby is inherently anti-capitalist.
My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe(or other countries). One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land. Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle. The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
I think this kind of contradiction is expressed most clearly in American literature and is also most worth articulating within the American cultural context. This is because its commodity economy and social transformation have been too successful, and it lacks the kind of historical entanglements that Europe has to dilute these problems. As a result, this sense of emptiness stands out even more sharply and demands a more urgent response.
I don’t know if there are horror films like this, but I once saw something similar in the TV series WandaVision. She creates an illusion in which she and Vision are a standard middle-class couple, well-fed and well-clothed, with the visuals in black and white. This made it feel like a horror story to me. Why? Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
Of course, I don’t think that America’s secular success means it has no spiritual world; rather, the former has been so successful that the latter has been greatly neglected. The purpose of American literature should be to depict, under the success of this commodity economy, what people’s inner lives have actually become, and what they ought to pursue. This, to me, is its most distinctive quality.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) is probably Jewish.
Nick Carraway is probably gay, but at least bisexual.
Both of these traits forced people into lower castes this era in high-status society. To me the lens of the book is repeatedly the failure of "if only I can win them over" slowly becoming the unsatisfying "these people were always assholes." Whether it's parties, a potential spouse, or important friends, the entire concept of class structure is poison. If people are good people, it shouldn't matter how they present themselves... that's just what I've always taken away from it. It seems like a theme that someone with Fitzgerald's background would want to convey, especially someone with that background who enjoined the company of people like Hemingway. And I think that's been a theme of American culture since reconstruction.
This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read it literally, or just get bored of books in general. On one hand, I admire the fact that great books are read by young people (something which isn't true in my country), but I wonder whether it ends up being counterproductive.
Adaptations running away from the main story to focus overtly on stuff that attracts the audience instead of being faithful to the crux of the source material doesn't help either.
And I was one of the few who got it when we read it. I don't think anyone I knew realized the movie Easy A shared any themes with that book, but it was just so much better done they understood the relevant themes from it.
I distinctly remember being completely bewildered when we read "Hills Like White Elephants" [1] and our teacher told us it was about an abortion, and ultimately about commitment and relationships and the ungraspable decision points that define a life. I remember rereading the text, not finding those words anywhere, and being confused about how a man and woman having a halting conversation at a train stop might have possibly given her that takeaway. But now of course it's achingly obvious.
Jane Austen similarly passed me by in high school. I needed to understand women a lot better before Pride & Prejudice started to make sense.
Even still when I read the classics, there are some where I can appreciate the themes but which are too abstract to me for them to resonate. The difference from when I was young is that now I can tell that there's more story waiting to be told once I've lived more life. Maybe in another 20 years.
[1] https://jerrywbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Hills-Lik...
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise:
Now let's see how we understand that meaning. Oh! We play endless sessions of Dungeons & Dragons! Here's a sword +4 and here's a cursed shield -2!
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
The entire article is a maze of ideas, explaining very little in the end. Okay, it’s misunderstood by young readers, people who think the latest movie adaptation looks cool, and so on.
That’s it? You don’t think The Catcher in the Rye and Dracula were even more misunderstood? I don’t get what the BBC columnist is getting at here. I’ve re-read the novel and it does ‘feel’ different when you’re older, but it never conveyed that the 20s were cool and parties were awesome back then. Ach!