A Classic Summer Read

26:20Just his father from the Midwest who found out about it in the paper. Not even his mafia handler comes and shows up at his funeral there. So at the time, Fitzgerald is one of those people, a lot of the authors we're going to talk about in the series have achieved this iconic status, which actually blinds culture from seeing them directly. They become a totem of themselves. And the Gatsby, we talk about this in the run-up of the show, the thing that's most enduring about Gatsby for most people is the idea of a Gatsby-themed party. Baz Luhrmann probably only makes that adaptation because this idea of the Gatsby-themed party is out there, of the music and the ambiance and the clothes and the attitude.

27:02The flapper dress and the long cigarette holders. Yeah, and this sort of ironical pose. We get this from Jordan Baker. It's like baked into this. And that's one of the things that struck me. I haven't read this book. We can get to our own reactions and relationship to it. But that's one of the things that struck me is that there's a self-awareness built into it already that they're playing parts, which I had forgotten or didn't pick up the first time. And those poses then get stripped away. And once they get stripped away, they're raw, they're exposed, and they have really no capacity to deal with what's left over.

27:35when those things are stripped away. That was also astonishing to me that Fitzgerald is 29 when this book comes out. Carraway is 29 in the book. His 30th birthday is approaching. And there is a remarkable self-awareness and a surprising amount of insight into their lives, what to be disillusioned about Carraway's perspective on Gatsby and the hollowness of that. He has this huge home, but it's always empty. He throws these parties, but they're parties that there's a great line. No one was invited to them. People just simply came. People just show up to his house because they're not interested in him.

28:11They just all want to be at the party. At the scene. Yeah. And he's a tool for that. But there's no real connection for him. And this is a man who has spent the last five years pining after someone that he knew very briefly but convinced himself was the girl of his dreams. And that if he could construct this life where he looked wealthy, he would get her. So it's just a huge house of cards built on a lot of assumptions that Gatsby has made. And Carraway can see that and tells us from the very first couple of pages that he, well, first Carraway tells us that he doesn't judge anybody. And then he tells us that he had scorn for everything that Gatsby stood for from the start.

28:54But this is a remarkably mature perspective for someone to have written in their mid-20s. And I had a lot of thoughts about the mid-20s ain't what they used to be.

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33:14To my mind, one of, if not Fitzgerald's greatest skills or projects is to try to describe the ineffable something of someone, right? In talking of Gatsby's smile, that's one of my passages, we'll go for a minute, or Daisy's voice, or the dynamics between someone, or Jordan Baker's repose on the couch. He uses these unusual descriptors, and he very much cares about capturing the aura, the effect that someone has, or that some moment. The plot of Gatsby is lewd, It's salacious. But for me, sort of beside the point, frankly, because the moments that matter is describing Gatsby after this thing happens and how he seems, right?

34:04Or how this party felt or how this conversation went. That seems to me the pleasure. Those are the beachheads of which I want to... That's a beach I want to luxuriate on. It is a really singular kind of observation of both people and society group functions. And maybe it's the kind of thing that you have to come from somewhere like the Midwest into a place like New York. I think that outsider-ness, you have to be from somewhere else to see that this is the water. Right. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was born to a middle-class family in the Midwest. He aspired to East Coast wealth, to glamour. He dropped out of Princeton in 1917, and he joined the army.

34:45And while he was stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, who would become his wife. But she initially rejected his proposals because he didn't have any money. Yeah, it's in there. I mean, it's just that's not even subtext. It's just text. So this is where Gatsby gets the idea that he needs to look like he's rich and how Gatsby comes into his money and the ways that he is willing to be morally compromised in order to build up all of this wealth to try to get this girl who doesn't even know that he's still after her, except for a wild coincidence of a guy moves in next door. like it's just that outsider perspective i think really really matters here and that then zelda agrees to marry fitzgerald he becomes successful and that doesn't solve all of the problems like he's an alcoholic zelda has really serious mental health difficulties and like they both die pretty young fitzgerald dies in 1940 at the age 44 and at that time he thinks that the book is a failure Yeah.

35:44I mean, it is amazing, and this is something we're going to see over time, especially for older books. The life these books have had since is sort of completely removed from what the author or the time period had. And as you mentioned, you have in the notes, you're like, this book became famous later. After Fitzgerald's death, there was this really important edition of, I think, The Last Tycoon that Edmund White, who Fitzgerald met at Princeton, put out that included all of the great Gatsby in it. And so Fitzgerald as a tragic figure and chronicler of tragic figures himself, I think was very interesting to people.

36:20And then Gatsby gets picked up, it becomes a paperback edition, distributed through World War II, hundreds and 150 ,000, and then becomes, and we'll put a link in the show notes, we have some other reading here, becomes a staple of high school reading for reasons that I think are both interesting and sort of beyond the scope here, but it is short, right? It does have like this salacious plot that you can talk about. And the thing that got me this time is how obvious the obvious metaphors are, like the green light and Echelberg and Perkins and Fitzgerald. Perkins writes to Fitzgerald and says like, you've got this great metaphor.

36:53They're talking about the metaphor in it. Yeah. And like, it's just on the page. It's so weird. I remember, like, I will know the eyes of Dr. T.J. Echelberg, like for the rest of my life, because of how much my high school English teacher talked about it. And that was a surprising thing, going back and reading it, being like, oh, they only really mentioned it like three or four times. But a metaphor that's mentioned three times is kind of weird for a book like this. That it is that potent and that present in it. The book's initial reception was really interesting, like well-received by critics.

37:22It's Fitzgerald's third book, but not as well-received as the first two. And it didn't sell nearly as well. I guess you were saying this. It only sold 25 ,000 copies in the first 15 years of its publication. And at that point in 1940, Fitzgerald writes to Zelda and says, my God, I am a forgotten man. Like he's a little dramatic, maybe. I mean, I think he probably tended to the dramatic gin-soaked and emotional is a real vibe. But he's been like a darling of the literary scene. He's traveling back and forth to Europe. He's friends with Hemingway. But the Great Depression hits after the stock market fall in 1929, and the books fall out of favor.

38:03And the discourse around this is interesting. Did they fall out of favor because culture was shifting and perspectives on wealth were shifting? Or my reading of it is most books fall out of favor. Yeah, your base case is that it falls out of favor. Right. But Fitzgerald dies believing the book is a failure. And then in 1945, the Council on Books in Wartime picks a bunch of titles, as you were saying, to make cheap paperbacks out of.

38:31They Those guys read these books and they come back talking about them. And it brings back Great Gatsby into cultural awareness and Gatsby sticks then. Just 10 years later, Scribner published the first student edition in 1957. And Great Gatsby has been Scribner's bestselling book of the year basically every year since then. Yeah. It's incredible. It really made Scribner. And then Scribner, which became part of Simon & Schuster. it was one of the backlist workhorses that's really supported over time. And these things then, once they get sort of escape velocity in the culture, and then there's really no going back.

39:13They have an inertia on its own. You couldn't really stop The Great Gatsby now. It's a brand as much as it's an actual book. And I guess as we go, maybe we'll transition here to our own initial reading experiences, what it was like to return to it is that's certainly how I remember encountering The Great Gatsby the first time I read it on my own. I was not assigned it in high school. They wrote it in high school. Oh, wow. Okay. Is that I was sort of tackling one of them, right? Here's one of the ones you need to have gotten. And I will admit this, I don't remember my initial reaction other than I really was like, wow.

39:46But other than that, I've got no sense memory. I think I even got a couple of the plot points wrong, but there's still a lot there. And the thing that really strikes me now is how Gatsby's portrayal of the kind of person he was is also what's happened to Gatsby the book itself. Because the stuff, the cliches that have come out of it, like the old sport thing, was a put on and acknowledged as a put on in the book. Tom calls him out, where did you get that, man? What are we doing here? What is that? He is playing someone who he thinks would do something like this. And he has this fake library. There's this really wild scene.

40:27It's very small, in which Nick Carraway is coming into Gatsby's house for the first time, which he's kitted out to essentially woo Daisy. This is like one of those birds that builds an elaborate nest. This is what he's done. It's like, someday she'll come over and this is the thing that's going to make her love me. And so there's this bespectacled old guy sitting in the library being like, he really did it. This is perfect. But what's perfect about it is that it's the perfect representation of someone representing that they have a library, but they've left the pages uncut on purpose because to cut them would be too far.

41:03But you have the books, but you actually do the thing. That's enough. and I know that you know, that we know, that I know, that this is all a performance. And that Gatsby is now cosplay is so mind-blowingly perfect or terrible that it's kind of hard for me to get my head around. Well, I think that's it, that it's so good. Yeah. That's what's depressing about it. Right, yes, yes. That he has built such a successfully fake life for himself. And if you're wondering what uncut pages are, friends, If you've seen deckled edges on a book, that is now imitation of the way that books used to be printed, where the pages were still kind of bound on the edge, and you would have to cut them apart to be able to flip the page and read.

41:47So deckling used to be incidental, not decorative. Symptom, not the cause. Right. Yeah, I think I definitely did not grasp how sad this book is and how depressing Gatsby's life is when I was in high school. I think we read this my sophomore year. I remember a couple of the lines. I remember that Daisy's voice was full of money. I remember the thing about beautiful little fools. I remember the eyes of Dr. T.J. Ekelberg. The green light at the end of the dock? I mean, some of that stuff I remember. The actual reading experience. I absolutely wrote an essay about what the symbolism of the green light at the end of the dock was.

42:25That's what we have LLMs for now. Right. I mean, honestly, like, okay. And I remember that Fitzgerald in my, you know, whatever high school honors English was taught in contrast to Hemingway. Like, I also remember an assignment to write a short story in the style of either Fitzgerald or Hemingway. And that, you know, one would be like very straightforward language and short sentences and the other would be Fitzgerald. And I think that in the almost 30 years since then, my reading of Fitzgerald, I would have gone back to Fitzgerald sooner if I hadn't constructed this high school-based memory of it as really flowery.

43:04As you were saying, the sentence structure is original, and it's surprising and really different from reading a book that is published or set today. He makes interesting language choices. I don't know how it felt to read it in 1925. I think some of the slang would have felt timely, and it feels old and like a mark of its time now. I don't remember having a great time when I read Gatsby in high school. It was a book I had to read for school, and I was a nerd, so I wanted to understand why it was important. You wanted the gold star for having read Gatsby. A hundred percent. I wanted to be able to show up at the cocktail party and explain the meaning of the green light.

43:47You know, like I can do that. We're good. No one has ever asked me to, very sadly. But sitting down to read it as an adult, like, first of all, I was like, hell yes, this book is 200 pages long. Thank the maker. Sign me up. But also like it rips. I sat down thinking I I would read the first 50 pages and I read almost the entire thing that afternoon. And my husband came home from work and was like, how was your day? And I was like, newsflash, the great Gatsby is fucking awesome. Yeah. And that flat, I mean, I think the flowering, I hesitate. Well, here, can we reclaim flowery? Let's reclaim. Flowers are great.

44:34Yes. I love flowers. Again, and looking at a whole bunch of art museums, like, The idea of capturing the specificity and ornateness of kinds of flowers is really cool. And it's not purple prose, though. It's not. He's using unusual. I had to, quote unquote, stop and consider, what is going on with this? What is this description? What is going on with this? There are words I don't remember ever knowing before. Pasquenade, dilatory. I'd look a couple things up and remember. And I don't know if at the time, I don't know if that was intended, but it makes you slow down. and he's really trying with all of the sort of painterly tools that he has to really capture the specificity of what he's feeling to give a sense impression of what's going on.

45:18Whereas Hemingway, like in the great example, he's doing as little as he can to give you that, like to give you, like, can I just like sort of huff in that direction and you feel the whole thunderstorm? Whereas Fitzgerald's like painting every single wave and he's like trying to do something. It's a very mannered, I guess, is maybe a way of putting it. But I find it very rich and stimulating me too i found it to be a really literary method of world building like this is what i want world building to be give me three sharp sentences that tell me exactly what it felt like to be in that place i don't need like the 20 page history of where the marble from the house came from or 45 more pages about the complicated how the money works right how much everything the complicated system of government or any of those things like i think that has its own utility in a different kind of book.

46:08But this is what I want from a literary writer is say the thing and say it beautifully. And in a way that resonates, even if I do have to go look up a word. You feel like you know what it would be like to walk through. It gives sort of experiential articulation. Right. Yeah, I get that. I can feel that. You feel like if you were to just be dropped into that party, you would know that this is a Gatsby party or like, oh shit, I'm in that hotel room with them on this August afternoon. You can feel all the bad decisions coming. Yeah. The rootlessness, the aimlessness of the people who have already sort of made it to the mountaintop and then are sort of looking around and what's left is like, I guess I have to have the girl and have her completely.

46:56And that's the only thing that would never make anyone happy either. But yeah, on second blush, I was surprised that to find myself really to be more enamored with a sentence or a scene or a paragraph than the tragic comic character of Gatsby, which I think still hits, right? I think it's not just about the past, but I think the question of judgment is very much there, of like, how do you think about flawed people? I felt that to be very contemporary, frankly. I don't want to talk about cancel culture at all, but what I do want to think about a little bit is how caraway sort of vacillates his viewpoint on the people that he's encountering because there's there's no good character oh no and even like the monster is tom buchanan what tom buchanan represents i think pretty clearly but even tom caraway says i kind of get what why he did it that way at one point he doesn't like tom he doesn't want to be around Tom, but he doesn't eject Tom from his field of interest.

48:03He doesn't not ever consider Tom. He doesn't sort of make a final judgment on Tom, which I think the last line is much more famous than the first line in The Great Scatsby, but this weird articulation of one thing I turn over in my mind again, I don't have exactly, maybe I'll get it here in a second, is like my father said, not to judge people until you know where they came from. So this This interplay of the past and the present and how much someone is accountable for their own actions, but how someone can be attributed to where they came from, and both things are true, and they're in conflict and tension, is wildly helpful as an adult, as a wildly helpful as a person in the world.

48:42And Caraway wrestling with that and saying, but for some people, I do you. At some point, there are some actions you have to be like, that was a bad job. But does that mean they're a bad person? Does that mean they have to be exercised or ostracized? Maybe not. I don't know. Yeah. And that, I think, also serves a couple of functions for us as we're supposed to read or be challenged by Carraway because he's complicit in all. He's going along with all of it. He's the one who arranges for Daisy and Gatsby to get together. So he's facilitating these people having an affair. But we know that Daisy's husband is terrible and we know that Nick can see what Gatsby is longing for.

49:19So maybe this is immoral, but how bad is it actually? And I think he's asking himself that question. What does it mean to see that Gatsby's life is pretty fake and pretty hollow, to recognize that Gatsby's involved in some shady financial dealings? And Carraway holds himself out of those, but he certainly benefits from what Gatsby has done. And he gets access to that world and access to the glamour and access to dating a woman like Jordan Baker, even though he knows it's going nowhere. And so he's, I think, both letting himself off the hook for some of this, like judging everybody more than he's willing to judge himself, but also inviting us into considering the ways that it's more complicated.

50:04There's not a straightforward reading really on any of these characters. And for a book that's 200 pages, that's great, first of all. Everything is very compact. It packs a powerful punch. And that's a thing that I want more from fiction. One of the things we've talked about on the Book Riot podcast in the last year really is seeing this uptick in even contemporary literary writers saying the thing, giving giving us the lesson, giving us the moral overtly. And I want fiction, especially, to function in a place that invites the questions, not where the lesson is just written across the last page.

50:43And Fitzgerald, I think, sets the table for that really beautifully. I mean, there's parts of it that still feel very contemporary, because when you encounter, and you go back to these works that, again, you've read 30 years ago, that were written now 100 years ago, how much does our contemporary sensibility or contemporary truths or understanding do we bump against things that are representations here? Worldviews, isms of various different kinds, this is not without. I mean, I think probably Meyer Wolfsham is probably this Jewish criminal figure, right? So he has his own complication, right? I tried to make it clear to someone I'm their friend whether they're alive, rather than dead, not showing up at the funeral.

51:25but the moment that really struck me is like this holds up better than i thought yeah is our introduction to tom buchanan and tom buchanan who is described as having a cruel body like is even sort of hulking mass and how he's put together and how he presents himself to the world he enters into the room talking about this book he just read about how the white race is going to be taken over and we got to do something about this and then and then daisy sort of as a size he's like, Tom's gotten very serious. It's like, she takes air out of it right away. And the book doesn't come out and say, this is a bad and wrong idea.

52:00It's that like, he seems a buffoon right away. And this is sort of a ridiculous position to hold. From the first scene with him, you know that if we ported him into 2025, like we know exactly which websites and cable news networks Tom would be reading. One of my favorite lines in the book, one of my favorite descriptions was Carraway describing Tom as one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savers of anti-climax. Like, bro, peaked in high school. Peaked in high school is 100 years old. It was Fitzgerald the first person to do a peaked in high school again.

52:36It's peaked at Princeton or wherever Tom ended up going. But he's not a figure as, and this is something that feels very awkward on to me, I would say that these clownish buffoonish figures that seem to be the first inclination is to create them as objects in ridicule, can still backhand you and break your nose, as he does later on. The buffoonishness is terrible. It's King Kong with the clown wig, because it can still wreck your life, wreck the city, and wreck the world. And that's where Buchanan is. And his desire, his designer of ownership, is a twin of Gatsby's desire for ownership. Compared to Buchanan, Gatsby's a romantic, like a flawed kind of romantic.

53:17And even romanticism itself, I think, is one of the object of Fitzgerald's ire, because this idea that there's this one person for you, and they're soulmates, and they love forever, and they can't have loved everyone else, and everything else would be perfect. That view is very much positioned as an engine of destruction. That one worldview, that one story, that one way of being, and should it get adulterated, contaminated, otherwise compromised, we've got to drive the world into the fire, is in the book. That's not the way to be. That's going to lead to tears and death, frankly. And I found that to be pretty shocking to encounter here again.

53:56Yeah. Jesmyn Ward wrote the introduction in the paperback copy that I have, because I had to buy a new one. I couldn't find my high school one. And she makes a note there about what it's like to teach this to high schoolers and what young people see in it, but also how much of the subtext becomes clearer with age and that it's for Gatsby. It's the love for that moment, like being the time that he knew Daisy has rendered all other avenues of possibility impossible to him. And that it's this fixation on one way that you think life has to be in order for you to be happy and trying to drive exclusively towards building that one thing, everything else be damned.

54:37Like that is the thing that is most guaranteed to make you unhappy and it'll destroy you and it'll destroy everybody in your orbit. Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders, that perfect hang on the patio sundress, those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope? It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross.

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55:54Obsession is 96 % fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I love you so, so, so, so much. It's blood-soaked nightmare fuel. What kind of sponge you put on her? You have been warned. Obsession, rated R, under 17, 90 minute without parent. Only in theaters May 15th, with special engagements in Dolby. Yeah. And interestingly, I think one of the things that, you know, some of the theories about why it fell off during the Depression was that it was this representation of wealth, right? It's hard to... I mean, I think that's one of the neat tricks Fitzgerald also pulls off is that you kind of want to spend time in the rooms, right?

56:29In these moments, but you don't want to be these people and you don't really want to be around these people. And as it became almost a cliche of itself, it's like, it's not... I mean, money is certainly part of it. There's no question about that. But it is also about things that transcend that these people are rich, that they put there are these certain situations, they have the ability to... They can do everything but the last thing. They can buy everything but the thing they can't buy. You know, very similar, I think, to Succession, that a lot of the pleasure is, wow, these people are terrible, and watching that they can access everything except the one thing that really matters.

57:11This is a tale as old as time. It's a trope that artists have been visiting and revisiting and probably will be. If we had sort of a how does it hold up in terms of a modern sensibility scale, remarkably well, I would say. It's certainly not going to map neatly onto everything that sort of a left-leaning literary person, as we are, are going to bump up against. And certainly if you have any kind of grace for 100 years ago, things were different. I think you're not going to find too much to sort of depress you or give you the yucks about it here. I did think it's funny you have in the trivia here that Carraway doesn't come out and say he hates phonies, but he's on phony watch.

57:58And that is very Holden Caulfield coded, I would say at this point. And it's mentioned in Catcher in the Rye that it was a favorite of his... Mentioning Gatsby to someone like Salinger, he was a person who would have maybe read this as a paperback in the army. But I can see how this would have been very influential in creating a Holden Caulfield-like character. Because it is kind of... Frankly, it's more of a coming-of-age story of Carraway, of trying to learn about the world and how to be a little bit later in life. that Caulfield is representing. Yeah. Most of the things that Carraway observes these people do, like this is a cautionary tale about how not to live, which is the whole point that it looked, Gatsby's life looks like the life that people, many people think that they want.

58:49It's glamorous. There's all this money and the fancy parties and everybody wants to be around him and the whole nine, but he is lonely and miserable and fixated on the past in a way that he's never going to get over. And even when he gets the shot at the girl that got away, he can't be happy with it. Like there is actually no making this man happy, which is its own kind of ruin. But then he makes such bad decisions that he ends up, you know, like his life is actually ended by his involvement with all of these people. Interesting for how like how spicy Caraway's take really is on everything, that there aren't a lot of major controversies around it.

59:29how terrible rich people can be is, I think, a permanently relevant stance to take. Well, I think this, Rebecca, I think that's an interesting point. And I think part of the reason this goes back to something we just said is there is not a neat quote you can pull and sort of meme to death about money is the opiate of the mass, like I'm bastardizing marks at this point. The root of all evil. I mean, the careless people thing you have, there's a couple of them, but it's so more nuanced than that, that the critique is, it's much more withering because of it, but it doesn't neatly come into like, yeah, it's not the jungle, but for rich people.

1:00:11It's not an Upton Sinclair expose because Carraway is adjacent to it and he's a bonds tradesperson. It's not like he's a brick worker or something that's observing all of this. But I think because the perspective is so articulate and sophisticated, it's not easy to essentialize and extract for future deployment and weaponization. Yeah, and he's so good at showing that he doesn't have to tell. Yes. And I think that's what Fitzgerald is sort of most, and this is true in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful of the Damned, he's sort of interested in the crackling air between two people who have a complicated relationship.

1:00:48That is his 1.21 gigawatts, ride the lightning, Mr. Fusion. That's where he wants to be. He is so interested in those unspoken, enacted dynamics and trying to capture the feel of it, the experience of being in those rooms, that in doing that, I think he kind of maybe comes at a critique sideways, if there's such a critique, because money is corrupting and these people are kind of bad to each other. They're not interested in being good, I think is another thing that I noticed. They're not interested in anything. They're not interested in anything. It's all an ironic pose and positionality. Yeah, it's that they're not interested in anything, that there's nothing here.

1:01:30It's all edifice. They're looking for the next party. And again, if you're putting this in a larger context of World War I, right, this great disillusionment and what does it all mean? I think one thing that might strike a modern reader too is that if you have a character now, it was set in, even if someone today was writing this story, and Nick Carraway and all these dudes had been on the front lines in World War I, someone would have PTSD. Like, it would be, like, it's kind of just mentioned, like, oh, yeah, we were at the forest, right? I was at the battle line. I was the captain of the machine gun crew, and we don't talk about the war anymore.

1:02:06Like, how casual it sort of was. But then you see the second order effects of, like, all these people are looking for meaning after this great apocalypse. And no one goes to church anymore, which they talk about, no one's showing up. They don't seem to be interested in philosophy or art or anything else like that. They know enough to buy the library to show the thing, but no one's going to read a book, except for Carraway, who says, I'm going to study and I'm trying to do some other thing there. And that carelessness, right? So this is one of the great pulls you have here. Tell me about the most modern reference to careless people.

1:02:35So Sarah Wynne Williams, who wrote the big Facebook expose earlier this year, The book was called Careless People, and it comes from a quote from Great Gatsby where Caraway is describing Tom and Daisy and really the whole ilk. They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made. As an age of day. No. As an age of day. On the adaptation fronts, I would say, I'm not going to spend much time on this, all of them unsatisfied.

1:03:12They all have terrible tomato ratings. When I finished the book last week, I thought maybe I'll go back. I've never seen the 1974 adaptation with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. And then I looked at everything and I was like, no, we're not going to spend two and a half hours that way. There's an adaptation from 2000 that I don't think I'd ever heard of with Toby Stevens. I'd heard of it. I haven't seen it. Who is Toby Stevens? I don't know. Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway. All right. I've seen the Baz Luhrmann one. I thought that was unsatisfying in its own ways. This has been adapted.

1:03:45And there are a couple others. There are at least two other adaptations of it. None of them seem to have been well-received. For what Fitzgerald was able to capture so well on the page, it doesn't seem that anybody has had much success adapting it to the screen. Yeah. Yeah. So if you've ever wondered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Francis Scott Key, yeah, they are related. Fitzgerald was named after Francis Scott Key, who of course wrote the National Anthem. I didn't know you got rejected titles here. Let's just say they've landed on the right one. F. Scott Fitzgerald, shitty at titling books. You don't think the gold-hatted Gatsby would have been better?

1:04:20Among the ash heaps and millionaires. A high-bouncing lover really is an avoided mistake. On the road to West Egg, like, okay. Simply Gatsby? Sure. My favorite of the rejected ones is Trimalchio in West Egg. And I had to Google, like, what the fuck is a Trimalchio? It's a person. Trimalchio was a character in Satyricon by Petronius, who was known for his lavish displays of wealth. So, like, good call on not putting an already obscure character's name into a book title. Like, we would not be sitting here in 2025. Maybe Trimalchio in 2025 was like saying Romeo. I mean, I had to look it up again.

1:05:02I recognized, I was like, I think that's a literary character, but that was a real bad one too. I mean, The Great Gatsby, this is one of my hot takes here, is like, it's ironic. The title is ironic. And this goes back to the point I was making before, but Fitzgerald's satirical, I mean, there's a satire element to this. It's not a farce, but there's a satirical cutting element to this. and this greatness is sort of i think if greatness could be in quotes maybe that's a better description of it one of the pieces i read researching the show today referred to it like think about it as a magician you know the great gatsby and the gatsby the great maybe captures that weirdly just moving the definite article around i think captures a little bit more that's a really good point but like it's built into the title of carraway is evaluating this greatness and it's not great.

1:05:53And yet it is, right? Because he did this thing. Yeah, the illusion. He's really successfully created the illusion. The illusion. But like a magician, the illusion is amazing in itself, right? That he pulled off this neat trick of finding himself at Oxford and then leveraging that into something else and becoming the great party master of Long Island in the roaring 20s to the point where he became a legendary and mythic figure by creation and accident at the same time. Pretty amazing at this point. Rita likes. This feels so singular to me that I really struggled with Where Do You Go? I don't have a good one.

1:06:34I really don't. If you liked Gatsby, I think you do go back to more Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise. It's been a while since I read those, but I think I remember liking Tender is the Night better. I like them all. And those are great book titles also. What happened to him when he got to the great Gatsby. Well, those are all pulled from Shakespeare. So I'm pretty sure. Hemingway did it too. They both were pulling for Shakespeare of Tyler, for whom the bell tolls farewell to arms. Those are amazing. You know why? Because the bard wrote them. And see above, read. You don't have to read anything, except maybe you do have to read Shakespeare.

1:07:08Yeah. I went looking. So when Gatsby started coming into public domain, there were a ton of spins on Gatsby, like more than you can swing a cat at. So if you want like contemporary spins on these characters. You can Google your way to at least 100 of those. But some of the most interesting ones that I found, Kira Davis-Lurie published a novel called The Great Man, M-A-N-N, that is set in the same time period in the 1920s, but it remixes Gatsby as a story among a wealthy elite Black community in Los Angeles. There's Beautiful Little Fools by Gillian Cantor, which shifts the perspectives to the three women of the book, Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan Baker, whom we didn't really talk about much, but she's a golf player that is friends with Tom and Daisy.

1:07:53I found myself very interested in her. And then Caraway sort of has a summer fling with her. Maureen Corrigan wrote a book called So We Read On, which is a play on the last line of the novel about, basically, it's what we talk about when we talk about Gatsby. And then there's an audible original called The Great Gatsby at 100 that came out this year that one of the Patreon folks recommended to me that is six lectures from the Great Courses series about the Great Gatsby. So if you want to go more down the nerdy path, you could go there. But there are Goodreads lists galore of books featuring the Great Gatsby characters, remixes, news spins, perspective shifts, gender bending, race bending, like whatever flavor you want to do that explores these characters and these themes.

1:08:37There is a twist on it. And I don't know that Gatsby is the most remixed. It probably is Shakespeare. but there are so many of these. There's a lot, yeah. I guess if you go back a generation, it's not even a full generation, but if you go to Edith Wharton, backwards a little bit in time, she's writing about high society in New York and the complications. Again, it doesn't have the gin piece. It doesn't have the lemon and the, it doesn't have the sharpness, I don't feel like. It has sharpness, but it doesn't have this kind of sense of, it feels older, it doesn't feel modern. in this particular way.

1:09:14Literally and spiritually is a car crash. Like you just kind of read the whole thing with your hands over your face, like, oh my God, these people. Yeah, Warden is sort of a midpoint between an Austonian mode and a Fitzgeraldian mode, but I think it was like that too at the same time and deals with similar things. Let's get some of the sentences into the air. I've got a couple that I, you know, my temptation is to spend five minutes per word on some of these. What did you single out as something that you noticed? Another good Tom Buchanan one. Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

1:09:52You know exactly what that move looks like when this burly guy is trying to get you to go somewhere. I love I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. What I thought that meant when I was 17 and what I think it means now are very different. on the practical tip, it's a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people. That is really good. Let's see what I have here. I mean, there's a sentence that made me stop and think about it. There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. I hit the tired more now than when I was 17.

1:10:33I was much more interested in the pursued and the pursuing, but the busy and the tired were very, very fascinating to me. The Busy and the Tired would be a great memoir. Reserving Judgments is a Matter of Infinite Hope. That's amazing. That's an amazing idea. The idea of reserving judgment is a hopeful, optimistic attitude. And I guess the reason there is because it's not over, right? To withhold judgment is to suggest the story can trundle on and it's not over. That there's always the possibility that people will develop into something else. Yeah. Yeah. And then some of just beautiful. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne of the stars.

1:11:16I mean, just pretty. Just damn pretty. It is. There's a great description of Gatsby after Carraway has started to really understand who he is. It says, I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found to my disappointment that he had little to say. So my first impression that he was a person of some undefined consequence had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse. It's like, that's a burn. That is a real burn. And then some of his descriptions, he's trying to capture something of Gatsby's character. Gatsby is not...

1:11:56He's trying to come into the interior of Gatsby. It's not just he's a guy who loved a girl and And that was all, I mean, that's part of it. But listen to this. There must have been moments, even that afternoon, when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

1:12:30that is something other than he in love with a girl and couldn't get her. And that was the next place I was going to go in my notes too. So we're on the same wavelength now that also we should make sure to tell folks Jay Gatsby is not Gatsby's real name. This is - Oh, right. Yes. It's a put on, right? He was like a boatman. He met someone, inherited some money, and he was off to the races. His last name was Gats, and he has constructed this whole identity for himself. But Carraway sees it at some point that so he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to invent.

1:12:59And to this conception, he was faithful to the end. This vision of who he should be and how he thinks that he should show up in the world in order to get the things that he wants and to be successful and to eventually get the girl. This is the tragedy of him. It's a real kind of arrested development. But instead of saying he invented himself at 17 and he never grew, he gives us this beautiful, he conceived of this thing and he state fate. What a sentence, man. That's amazing. Yeah. I've got one big meaty one that I want to end with. Do you have anything else on your sentence list? No, let's go to the big meaty one.

1:13:33So I was saying before, the thing I found myself really taken aback by, which was Cheryl's interest, ability, and commitment to capturing the seemingly ineffable quality someone has of a gesture or a mood or a visage. And this is him on Gatsby's Smile, just a smile. He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may have come across four or five times in life. It faced or seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

1:14:12It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely impression of you that you, at your best, had hoped to convey. Hot damn. Rebecca Shinsky, that is worth a novel. That is worth a novel. Right there, most good writers would have done a tenth of that. If you get one sentence like that in your entire career as a writer, you've had a win. Well, it's not one sentence, right? Like, it's in just the way that it rhythms and it builds. And it goes from like, and it taps into this idea of like, the idea of someone with a great smile.

1:14:49And another writer might have said, it made you feel the way you wanted to feel and sort of moved on from there. But it's more than that, right? It's not like it knows what you know about yourself and affirms your wantingness. That Gatsby is smiling at you and you're seeing Gatsby smile at you and he's seeing you see him smile at you and that this whole power dynamic is constantly moving and constantly calculating. and it and and behind that is that can that possibly be a put on right can that be faked and if it can be fake do i care if it makes me feel that way i'm not sure i'm not sure just a remarkable little bit of insight pillars of the earth understanding of humans talk you know being in relationship to other humans and doing the most fundamental sort of human thing is to smile.

1:15:37I don't know. I was completely blown away by that. It makes me mad that someone who was like 27 when he started writing this book could achieve that kind of observation and perspective. Well, Fitzgerald too, in his early books, he was praised for this sort of thing, but critiqued for construction and plot. And you can see him layering a more sturdy plot onto this. I'm not sure he would have cared about... I think the plot stuff is an excuse for him to do this. I think this is what he cares about. That's my sense of what he cares about. And I think that's not a bad way of reading a book. If you can find what the author is caring about and lean in and really dig into those moments like, this is what they live for.

1:16:24This is what the book exists to serve as a coat rack to hang a beautiful garment. And what are the great descriptors of humans? just amazing. I think that's a great lead into the, so how do you know if you want to read this book? I mean, if a likable character is a thing that you need, I would run away. You're not going to get that here. If you need to understand, because some of these descriptors I don't feel like I can completely wrap my head around. They kind of elude me in some way, and I find that to be tantalizing and affirming because there's a lot more for me there. If you're a sentence lover, great.

1:17:03If you're less of a sentence lover, you may find it more trying. I think those are both really accurate for what kind of reader you are. If like me, when you're at dinner, you are eavesdropping on the people next to you, and you know that the person you're dining with is doing the same thing, and then you're going to get in the car afterwards and be like, did you hear when they said this thing? And did you notice when that happened? Like, this is a book for you. Yeah. There's a great line. I don't have it in front of me about how large parties are much more intimate than small parties because at small private, there's no privacy.

1:17:38Yeah, nobody feels like they're being watched at a big party. Everyone's feeling watched the whole time. Really fascinating stuff in there. Yeah, like, it is a novel of manners. But if you're interested in interpersonal dynamics like that, it can be pretty great. Again, even if you're like, I'm not sure if this is for me, the ask is not large. Yeah, I think if you want, you have to be good with morally gray areas. If you want an author who's going to come down solidly on these people are good, these people are bad, these actions are okay, these actions aren't okay, you will not get that here. There's a lot of ambiguity.

1:18:08And Caraway, as you were saying, tells us from the very beginning that he doesn't want to judge himself or these people. I think that allows him to spend time with them and observe them deeply because he's not interested in demonstrating how good he is by declaring that they're bad. but you do have to be able to roll with something like that. If you're looking for a clear declaration from the author of his intent or his moral judgment about the characters, about what people should do, you won't get that here. I think, honestly, you won't find that in many of these. Yeah, I agree. You won't because that ages...

1:18:44Well, it doesn't age poorly necessarily, but it's not continuing interesting. It doesn't have a fount of engagement. I think it lacks art. necessarily, but there's no reason to return to it 20 years later. We are not in want of judgment, let's put it that way, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships or political... I do not find myself turning to art to tell me what I should think morally about the universe. I think it's not ammunition necessarily, it's education, it's sensibility training for how to encounter the world. But what's the most... The Inferno by Dante, okay, clearly about judgment.

1:19:21but the interest there is not the judgment it's the art like it's sort of the play and the inventiveness right like it was just like popes are bad like yeah great news 11 we can move on popes are bad so let's turn them upside down in baptismal fonts yeah right funny yeah the the variety the inexhaustible variety of dante's judgment is maybe the thing that talk about world building like a lattice work like the coat rack he cares about is in that well we can get into when we will do dante someday we'll get into dante what else to say about the great gatsby Rebecca. Did we leave anything that we'd be really pissed off about?

1:19:55No, I just want to say, I think if you're on the fence about it, or if you haven't read it in a while, don't trust your teenage reading of this. If the last time you touched this book was high school, and if you've never read it and you're on the fence, tilt into yes. I think this one is worth jumping in. There's a reason that we started with it and not just because it's 100 years old this year and it makes a nice content hook there is a lot to be found there's a lot to talk about there's a lot to wrestle with and these characters are of types that we have that existed in fiction before and that we continue to see in fiction and now we see in reality tv today and being able to sort of map how that all works and how artfully fitzgerald does it into the ways that you read contemporary work or that you, we sometimes talk about how you read a movie or how you read a TV show is I think really valuable.

1:20:49And just being able to recognize that this is a Gatsby sort of archetype. This is a Nick Haraway kind of archetype is really valuable. And that's another reason for us that we're taking this project on is that these books are valuable in themselves, but also they speak to each other over time. And having a grounded understanding of what happened in a book 100 years ago that someone's referring to in a book now also makes you a more well-rounded reader. Yeah. And you can also correct the reference, right? You can see how it's maybe a facile or surface-level reader understanding. I think that ends with us today.

1:21:26Bookriot.com slash listen. We can find the show notes there. I don't know that we have a spoke email yet, but we always can find us at podcast.bookriot.com. We'd really like to hear feedback about structure, which pieces of a show like this is going to be more or less interesting, what you find more on. We will, of course, take recommendations for things to cover. I would temper your expectations about the timeliness of responding to them. The master list for this is like 400 books long. Rebecca, thank you so much, Old Sport. Yes, and Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.