Review: The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve deleted and rewritten this ‘review’ a couple of times now. In its previous incarnations, I’d waxed lyrical about classic novels and context, and whether Gatsby was sufficiently universally themed to transcend my asynchronous reading. I’d mused on the comparison of new vs. old money that Fitzgerald describes, on Gatsby’s accrual of wealth via shady means, on love, on revenge, until I suddenly got a whiff of what I was writing, and erased it permanently. What an ass! I was attempting to write a review in the manner of how I thought I ought to be writing a review of The Great Gatsby, when it suddenly struck me that I didn’t give a shit about all that nonsense. It occurred to me that I thought that the book was only, wait for it, OK, and that I ought to write that instead.

Now me labelling something as simply ‘OK’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I was lucky enough to find myself in Rome a while back and, searching for an amazing coffee (feel free to insert your own ‘When in Rome…’ gag here), we came across a little cafe near the Pantheon called Tazza d’Oro, which many of the guidebooks labelled as “the best espresso in Italy”, and other similarly ridiculous hyperboles. On a high after experiencing probably my favourite thing in Rome, maybe even the world, the Pantheon, we wandered around the corner and excitedly took a table at the cafe. Well, whilst we both took a table, I was the only one who did it excitedly; Kath hates coffee, so I was flying solo in my coffee giddiness. I ordered the obligatory, and awaited its arrival with bated breath. What was it going to be like? How different from the shit I got served in Starbucks back home could it be? Would it make me piss unicorn tears and shit rainbows, like I hoped? Well, the coffee arrived, looking so very conventional in its little china espresso cup. Lulling me in to a false sense of security, I assumed. Not wanting to reveal its splendiferous hand too early, I guessed. With a trembling hand (not really), I raised that little cup to my lips and, in the split second before tasting it, I inhaled deeply to get a spoiler of what wonderment I was just about to taste. It smelled like… coffee. Yup, coffee. OK, maybe not quite as pungent as the shit you get in Starbucks, but it didn’t smell like god’s farts. Which I assume are awesome.

The tasting soon followed. It tasted like… coffee. Yup, coffee. OK, maybe not quite as bitter and after-tastey as the shit you get in Starbucks, but it didn’t taste of god’s… well, you get the picture. It tasted like a really good espresso. But, crucially, it didn’t taste like I imagined the best espresso in Italy should taste. Oh, it was probably the best espresso I tasted that holiday, and better than any espresso you can get in high street coffee shops (though James would argue that Laynes has the best espresso around, and I’m quite a fan of Opposite), but there was no gustatory fanfare and ticker-tape parade, no choir of angels exalting this taste sensation. Kath eagerly (not really) asked me how the coffee was. “OK,” I replied. Which it was. It wasn’t the greatest espresso I could imagine, so it couldn’t be described as “amazing”, or “mind-blowing”, so I was left with “OK” when ascribing it a rating.

So now that I’ve calibrated my review-o-meter for you, back to The Great Gatsby. It was OK. For a book that’s been described as “the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century,” (thanks, Wikipedia), I was expecting fireworks and rainbows and “You’re The Best” playing in my head constantly whilst reading it. Nothing of the sort, unfortunately. I’m sure the old money/new money conflict is as pertinent today as it was then, but I didn’t really care. Much is made of the hedonistic and shallow nature of Gatsby’s partygoers, and maybe that was revelatory back in the ’20s, but ten minutes of any shit-bag celebrity reality TV show will tell you the same. Sure, Gatsby’s an enigma, and I was interested in the onion-like peeling away of his many layers, from confident and mysterious socialite to insecure and unhappy, to a love-struck puppy, but that’s a relatively well-told story, and this version didn’t tell me anything new. (Also, for some reason I couldn’t get the image of Terry-Thomas out of my mind when thinking about Gatsby, whose massive gap-between-the-teeth is quite off-putting when you’re trying to concentrate.)

I guess this is always a problem I’m going to encounter when reading old books, or watching old films. Without the ability to disregard all subsequent derivate works of art, the originals that inspired will never actually seem original. It’s a weird anachronism where the more recent interpretations become the gold standard against which the originals have to be measured. Maybe I’m just too lazy to try and appreciate the value and the original inspiration contained in the classics but hey, there’s only so many hours in the day, and I’m far to idle and apathetic to delve any deeper. So sue me.