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A review by jjupille
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2.0
I know I am supposed to love this, but I don't. Briefly ...
First, I don't like Fitzgerald's writing. He's too overwrought. There was a clunker line in here that really led me to downgrade my opinion of Fitzgerald's writing and his editors' judgment. There were several others that just rang hollow to me. And, c'mon, yellow means death? C'mon, man.
Second, the emotional timbre is wrong for my taste. At the risk of being all kinds of offensive, it feels like chick lit. I just can't get my head into this space, and I tend to read more with my head than my heart. (See also [b:Tender Is the Night|46164|Tender Is the Night|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347573947s/46164.jpg|8272] -- hated it!)
Third, the characters don't really move me, and I guess characters to contemplate are important to my enjoyment of a book. Nick Carraway remains obscure, but not in a way that piques my curiosity. I mean, I want to try to get him to come out of the closet a little bit, let that ride, but I don't really care about him. At least his beard, the golfer lady, sounds sexy and smart and interesting and at least a little bit worldly. Personality-wise, Tom is at least 2-dimensional, but the dimensions (dick swinging and insecurity) are highly correlated, so it's really just that one "type", that guy, in the northeast quadrant (high on both dimensions). I don't buy Gatsby's undying love at all, and that kind of makes the character (and the book!) kind of unravel. The only character I find particularly interesting is Daisy, and that's as much because of her circumstance, her predicament, as her personality.
He's got a really interesting structural predicament for folks, class in interwar America and all that, and as a composite the characters-in-the-story (i.e., the people and the narrative) touch interesting terrain of all kinds. But I want the chance to fill in the blanks to draw fully realized characters, and only Daisy really gives me that chance here.
Fourth, Fitzgerald and I don't connect because, while I think social class is obviously an interesting and fruitful analytical and narrative terrain, the social class that most preoccupies him here and in Tender is the super-rich, of the old and nouveau varieties. I know suburbia real well, and I can taste, smell, hear, and feel --if not quite remember-- the immigrant and working classes. But the rich are utterly alien to me, and worse still, in terms of trying to read and enjoy a book as I can, I don't find them that interesting. I mean, they have their troubles. But insofar as showing us that is one of Fitzgerald's points, I'll stipulate and want to move on. I don't need some dandy to tell me that.
Related, I think, is the geography. I have a westerner's dislike of (insecurity toward?) New York and the east coast. I don't care about fucking Long Island and the city and upstate and the Hamptons and all of that. Yeah, I know, moving across these spaces involves social negotiations. I get that. But the fact that privileged or superficial people worry about that shit doesn't interest me. Only the pull of anthropology and the methodological appeal of participant observation could have interested me in the Greek system in college, and it's the same today. I am not that interested in how the rich and beautiful confront life's travails. Deal with it, pretty boy. From the other end of the telescope, I don't really care about midwesterners' provincial insecurities, either. At least the super-rich and beautiful really are cool, even if they're fucked up. The people who wish they could be like them, like the super-rich, are even less sympathetic to me. Shut the fuck up and deal with it. If we have to be geographic about it, I'd rather pound the grit of the West, which is glad y'all --and the East-- are close enough to where we can see you, but far enough away that we don't have to deal with you, before I start worrying about the view from Cincinnati. I am sure that's just me.
Bottom line, I am not a fan of FSF stylistically, and his world and the people in it kind of annoy me. So, two stars it is.
First, I don't like Fitzgerald's writing. He's too overwrought. There was a clunker line in here that really led me to downgrade my opinion of Fitzgerald's writing and his editors' judgment. There were several others that just rang hollow to me. And, c'mon, yellow means death? C'mon, man.
Second, the emotional timbre is wrong for my taste. At the risk of being all kinds of offensive, it feels like chick lit. I just can't get my head into this space, and I tend to read more with my head than my heart. (See also [b:Tender Is the Night|46164|Tender Is the Night|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347573947s/46164.jpg|8272] -- hated it!)
Third, the characters don't really move me, and I guess characters to contemplate are important to my enjoyment of a book. Nick Carraway remains obscure, but not in a way that piques my curiosity. I mean, I want to try to get him to come out of the closet a little bit, let that ride, but I don't really care about him. At least his beard, the golfer lady, sounds sexy and smart and interesting and at least a little bit worldly. Personality-wise, Tom is at least 2-dimensional, but the dimensions (dick swinging and insecurity) are highly correlated, so it's really just that one "type", that guy, in the northeast quadrant (high on both dimensions). I don't buy Gatsby's undying love at all, and that kind of makes the character (and the book!) kind of unravel. The only character I find particularly interesting is Daisy, and that's as much because of her circumstance, her predicament, as her personality.
He's got a really interesting structural predicament for folks, class in interwar America and all that, and as a composite the characters-in-the-story (i.e., the people and the narrative) touch interesting terrain of all kinds. But I want the chance to fill in the blanks to draw fully realized characters, and only Daisy really gives me that chance here.
Fourth, Fitzgerald and I don't connect because, while I think social class is obviously an interesting and fruitful analytical and narrative terrain, the social class that most preoccupies him here and in Tender is the super-rich, of the old and nouveau varieties. I know suburbia real well, and I can taste, smell, hear, and feel --if not quite remember-- the immigrant and working classes. But the rich are utterly alien to me, and worse still, in terms of trying to read and enjoy a book as I can, I don't find them that interesting. I mean, they have their troubles. But insofar as showing us that is one of Fitzgerald's points, I'll stipulate and want to move on. I don't need some dandy to tell me that.
Related, I think, is the geography. I have a westerner's dislike of (insecurity toward?) New York and the east coast. I don't care about fucking Long Island and the city and upstate and the Hamptons and all of that. Yeah, I know, moving across these spaces involves social negotiations. I get that. But the fact that privileged or superficial people worry about that shit doesn't interest me. Only the pull of anthropology and the methodological appeal of participant observation could have interested me in the Greek system in college, and it's the same today. I am not that interested in how the rich and beautiful confront life's travails. Deal with it, pretty boy. From the other end of the telescope, I don't really care about midwesterners' provincial insecurities, either. At least the super-rich and beautiful really are cool, even if they're fucked up. The people who wish they could be like them, like the super-rich, are even less sympathetic to me. Shut the fuck up and deal with it. If we have to be geographic about it, I'd rather pound the grit of the West, which is glad y'all --and the East-- are close enough to where we can see you, but far enough away that we don't have to deal with you, before I start worrying about the view from Cincinnati. I am sure that's just me.
Bottom line, I am not a fan of FSF stylistically, and his world and the people in it kind of annoy me. So, two stars it is.