In 2004, I attended a performance of Gatz, a stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that, in addition to witty interpretations of the novel’s key scenes, featured Fitzgerald’s entire text read aloud by the actors. The performance was seven hours long, including an intermission for dinner. At the break, the audience members began glancing at one another nervously, like fans at a ballpark when the home team pitcher has a no-hitter going. Of course, we knew how this story would end, because we’d all read the novel. We knew Fitzgerald would pull it off—the high wire act in prose that is Gatsby. As the final pages of the novel were read, I felt myself almost lifted out of my seat. And as the eternal closing sentences were spoken—
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
a kind of ecstatic sorrow enveloped us, one that both registered the empyrean resignation of the novel’s conclusion and our gratitude that it had been written at all, a bulwark against the world’s ugliness and futility. For a moment, I felt that I loved the woman sitting in front of me, and the man down the aisle, though they were destined to remain strangers. We had shared a transformative experience.
No piece of American literature has fused with our sense of who we are as a people—our fullest, gaudiest, most tragic and lachrymose sense—the way The Great Gatsby has. Melville’s Moby Dick might be the more universal achievement, but it exacts a greater tribute in boredom and obscurantism than most of us are willing to pay. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a candidate, too, but Americans don’t read much poetry anymore, and Whitman asks us to meet him with a strenuous spiritual effort of our own that fewer still are willing to make. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn helped make the American language, but its Southern antebellum setting embarrasses us now, even if Twain was satirizing it. Only Gatsby seems to take us as it finds us and—to quote the novel’s description of Gatsby himself—“to believe in [us] just as [we] would like to believe in [ourselves].” It is a grandiose and self-regarding novel for a grandiose and self-regarding people—American exceptionalism carried to the summit of high art.

The plot of Gatsby is, as H. L. Mencken wrote upon the novel’s publication, “in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.” Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and World War I veteran of sound midwestern stock, moves to New York in 1922 to get a start in the bond business. He falls in with his cousin, the former Daisy Fay, a Louisville socialite, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, a man of tremendous wealth and cultivated brutality who has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, whom he parades shamelessly. Nick begins to date Daisy’s cousin, the exquisite and jaded Jordan Baker.
Nick also happens to have as a neighbor the mysterious Gatsby, who gives tremendous parties at his mansion on Long Island Sound and who inspires fevered rumors, not least about the source of his money. Eventually, Nick learns that Daisy and Gatsby had been lovers before the war, when Gatsby was a penniless young officer, and that Gatsby has built his dubious empire entirely in tribute to her—with the conviction that she will leave her husband and be his once more.
Nick reluctantly agrees to have Daisy and Gatsby to tea, and reunited, they begin an affair. Tom discovers the affair, leading to a confrontation in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. On the drive back to Long Island, Gatsby’s car—driven by Daisy—strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, who has run into the road seeking Tom’s attention. Gatsby lies and says that he was the driver. Myrtle Wilson’s husband, George, made psychotic by grief—and possibly encouraged by Tom—hunts Gatsby down and kills him in Gatsby’s backyard swimming pool.
It falls to Nick to arrange Gatsby’s funeral. (“It grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.”) Almost no one comes—not Gatsby’s gangster friends, not the many who accepted his hospitality. At the end, it is only Nick, one former partygoer, and Gatsby’s yeoman father, Henry Gatz, who has traveled from North Dakota bearing stories of the young “Jimmy.” Gatsby’s dream has been a beautiful illusion. “He did not know that it was already behind him,” Nick tells us, “somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city.” “Tremendously sorry, and half in love with her,” but disgusted by the “rotten crowd” of which she is a part, Nick also ends his affair with Jordan Baker.
Critical commentary on Gatsby never fails to honor Fitzgerald’s style, especially its famous concluding paragraphs, in which Nick looks out upon the North Shore of Long Island and imagines it as the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” It is a style that is beautiful and sometimes deliberately excessive, one appropriate to a world of glamour, sensation, and disenchantment of which it does not quite approve. Fitzgerald often strains the limits of good literary taste, piling on modifiers (“peremptory heart,” “disembodied face,” “scornful mouth”) and pushing his conceits. (“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”) It is as if the aesthetic principle by which he composed the novel was that, if forced to choose, he would rather write nonsense than write something banal.
The music of Gatsby’s language is as important as its sense, at times maybe more so. I have often thought that you could read the final incantatory paragraphs to a non-English speaker and they would be moved just as Fitzgerald wishes us to be moved, even if the phrase “where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” denoted nothing for them. In this sense, the novel approaches the condition of poetry. We are being asked to read with greater openness, to reach just beyond the frame of our commonplace perceptions. Like any great novel, Gatsby teaches us how it must be understood. We might start out being puzzled by phrases such as “yellow cocktail music” or “ferocious delicacy,” but eventually Fitzgerald’s syntax becomes our own, and our devotion is deeper for being hard-won. Mencken praised the “charm and beauty of the writing” in a book he reviewed negatively, failing to see that Fitzgerald’s style was not merely words arranged euphonically but a total vision, not just of its myth-made settings but of American life itself.
Fitzgerald managed to flunk out of Princeton in 1916, and he felt thereafter that his mind was half-formed and his thinking unsystematic, a self-image encouraged in him by his Princeton classmate, the eminent literary critic, Edmund Wilson. (Wilson once compared Fitzgerald and his (to Wilson’s mind) unaccountable talent to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.”) As a thinker in prose, however, Fitzgerald was immensely gifted, with a mind highly sensitive to language and symbol. He himself defined “a first-rate intelligence,” tellingly, as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
His own novels were defined by just such oppositions. He was a socialist who saw that capitalism spoke to human longing; he was an alcoholic who was initially sympathetic to Prohibition on moral grounds; and he made his adult life mainly in New York, the south of France, and Southern California while nourishing an idea of the Midwest as his spiritual home. His ability to hold such ideas in dynamic tension through the course of a complex narrative is what makes his mature novels, preeminently Gatsby, so compelling. Abstract ideas existed for him in terms of the ineluctable forces of money, status, and human desire that test them and reveal the illusions they half-conceal. To regard Fitzgerald the novelist as deficient in quality of thought—as did Wilson, a more orthodox intellectual—is to make a category error.

Perhaps because Gatsby gives his name to the book, readers tend to remember the novel as his story. But as a measure of Fitzgerald’s intentions, the novel belongs to Nick Carraway. Nick starts out with one idea—as he admits, a rather stiff-necked one, learned from his father—about what a gentleman is and how he should behave. He has firm convictions regarding his own virtue. (“I am the only honest man I have ever known.”) This righteousness is leavened by a reluctance to judge too quickly, also a bequest from his father. (“‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone’, he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.’”) He is not overly beholden to social class. He knows that Tom is a cad and that there isn’t much behind Daisy Fay’s voice “full of money.” What Nick finds are American values older than that money—founding values that, ironically, are embodied by an arriviste who himself wants nothing more than to belong. (“Only Gatsby . . . was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”) Gatsby is gauche, he is criminal, he is foolish—but he is beautiful, too, in the innocence of his desire. “Gatsby turned out all right in the end,” Nick tells us. “It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” And so Nick returns home to the Midwest, subtly but crucially different. He has grown in sorrow but also in wisdom.
The startling transformation of Fitzgerald from The Beautiful and Damned (1922), a novel that he came to regret as “cheap melodrama,” to Gatsby (1925), one of the anchors of the American canon, has few parallels. In those crucial development years, he had undertaken a determined apprentice’s program in reading. That reading, principally in the work of Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, broadened his sense of what the novel as a form could do and of the techniques that were available to him. Gatsby is a technical feat of narrative construction and point of view that masquerades as an impressionistic romance.
Fitzgerald wrote that early in his career he had wanted to use the novel to “preach at readers in some acceptable form.” There is a good deal of such “preaching” even in Gatsby, in its intimations of psychic collapse and its implicit urging that we square our accounts. (Nick, at the beginning of the story—speaking here, I think we can say, for the author: “After the war I wanted the world to stand at a sort of moral attention forever.”) What’s different is the level of craftsmanship and the patience of Fitzgerald’s narrative strategies. He was 27 when he began work on the novel, 29 when it was published. One cannot escape the sense that, as he felt, he was the bearer of a complex and not altogether welcome message about the fate of his American generation—and then later, as he also felt, abandoned to ignominy after the reading public moved on.
Fitzgerald died at 44, of a heart attack, abetted by his alcoholism. And yet, paradoxically, the story of his life is somehow cheering. As with Gatsby, the beauty rather than the folly is what endures. As Lionel Trilling wrote, “Fitzgerald lacked prudence, as his heroes did, lacked that blind instinct for self-protection which the writer needs and the American writer needs in double measure. But that is all he lacked—and it is the generous fault, even the heroic fault.”
Top Photo: A first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair, 2013 (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)