Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is still great at 100
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic that fostered the American Dream remains fresh and urgent a century after its appearance
I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, for the first time in my early 30s. I had moved to Delhi around that time, rented the tiniest bedsit I could find in the upmarket southern part of the city, my very own version of the seamier West Egg side of Long Island Sound in the novel, and, like Nick Carraway, the Yale-educated but “no-money" narrator of Gatsby (to borrow a phrase from critic Tony Tanner), began getting acquainted with the new- and old-money denizens of the posher East Egg side of the society I had thrown myself into.
I had a sense of turning a corner in my life, like Nick, who turns 30 in the course of the novel, and his epiphanic line about that momentous event struck a cord with me: “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning air."
Recently re-reading the novel after an interval of nearly 15 years, I was amused by my youthful indulgences, which, in a sense, captures the essence of what Gatsby is all about. When it came out exactly 100 years ago, it portrayed a generation of men and women and their excesses, not just material but also psychological, during the so-called The Roaring Twenties.
The 1920s were a time of boundless hedonism. A flamboyant sense of optimism coursed through the air during those inter-war years, which would presage The Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by World War II. A century later, the capitalist effluence that Fitzgerald described in his novel is even more pronounced—watch the limited series, Sirens, on Netflix, in case you need a reminder, or just follow the exploits of Elon Musk and Co. The Great American Dream, once a rallying cry of egalitarian aspiration in the proverbial land of the free, is now the privilege of only the select few—indeed, the elected few, by the people.
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Instead of the glamour and cultural cache of the jazz age, we have the xenophobic, exclusionary politics of Donald Trump’s MAGA. In that sense, Fitzgerald’s novel holds up a perverse mirror to 21st century America—the glass has cracked and the reflections in it have become distorted and monstrous.
While it’s tempting to read The Great Gatsby as a social commentary, at its heart it is a bloody good story before everything else. Part of its mystique is the central character himself. As late as 1924, Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, “I have now decided to stick to the title I put on the book. Trimalchio in West Egg." Both Perkins and Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda dissuaded him from the idea, but the allusion is revealing.
Trimalchio refers to a social upstart in Satyricon, a classical play by Roman writer Petronius, who is a master of revels. He is a glutton with an outsized appetite for both sex and food and, like Jay Gatsby, is in the habit of hosting lavish banquets. Curiously, by the time the novel was ready for publication, not only had the title changed, but the eponymous hero resembled nothing of the Roman character.
Gatsby, as Nick tells us, doesn’t drink, though alcohol flows wildly at his parties. This generosity during the Prohibition Era not only attracts uninvited guests to his raucous evenings, but also raises more than a few eyebrows. And while Gatsby has ample opportunities to indulge in sexual dalliances, he remains unmoved by the women who throw themselves at him. He has eyes for one person only, and that is Daisy, Nick’s distant cousin, who is married to the boorish Tom Buchanan, scion of a wealthy family.
Gatsby’s life, especially his dodgy career, has been geared toward building wealth and a reputation befitting of Daisy’s exalted antecedents. He erases his origins, his given name, and all the myriad struggles he had to endure in order to retrieve his beloved from the clutches of her brutish husband. Unlike Trimalchio, he does not want to lose himself in the affluence he has amassed for the sake of it. Rather, everything he has achieved—the exquisite decor of his palatial home, his sprawling property with a swimming pool, the most beautiful clothes money can buy—are to impress Daisy as her potential suitor.
Apart from the enigma that is Gatsby, the other character of interest in the novel is Nick himself. Critics have pointed out that Nick isn’t Fitzgerald, though the two men have shades of each other, as does Gatsby and his author. Like Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy, Fitzgerald harboured a lifelong attraction to socialite Ginevra King. Although King reciprocated his love, her family was against the match with a young Midwesterner of no comparable pedigree except for an Ivy League education. Like Nick, who went to Yale, Fitzgerald attended Princeton, and like Gatsby, he served in the war. King’s friend, Edith Cummings, an amateur golfer, became the inspiration for Jordan Baker, who has a short-lived flirtation with Nick.
Although Nick is a stand-in for the omniscient narrator, he is not someone who can be fully trusted. “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known," he tells the reader, a statement that immediately puts the latter on the alert. He also reflects Fitzgerald’s ambivalent feelings about the Jazz Age, in that he is bedazzled by the splendour of Gatsby’s soirees but does not necessarily identify with his set. Instead, he keeps a delicate balance between distance and proximity, which gives him the advantage of having an interested outsider’s perspective on everything that comes to pass in the novel.
There have been several movie adaptations of The Great Gatsby, most notably by Baz Luhrmann in 2013, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. Unfortunately, the screen version puts an undue focus on the pomp and splendour of Gatsby’s parties, at the expense of going deeper into the hollowness of the human condition that the novel truly trains its eye on.
But, as with every great work of literature, the reader comes away with a new sense of significance with each reading. Revisiting it this time after a decade and a half, I saw less of the glitter but more of the gloom at the heart of the story.
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