The Great Gatsby

I've read The Great Gatsby before, way back in high school, but reading it as an adult was a completely different experience. It felt at once familiar and new - I remembered the giant billboard eyes and Gatsby's extravagant parties and the geography of West Egg and East Egg. But there was much about the story and the characters that felt as though I were encountering them for the first time. And much of that newness was not an "I've read this but it's been a long time" newness. Rather, it was an "I'm pretty sure I've never read this before."

Now, it's possible that there were whole passages of the book that I had not actually read before. I was a good student, and the book was short, but even I occasionally forgot to finish my reading, or skimmed because I had a big biology assignment, or got my dates mixed up, and good high school students learn to get around that sort of thing and still get A's on assignments. Still, whether or not I skimmed or skipped parts of the book on the first go-around, I had the distinct impression on this second go-around that there were things in the book that I just related to much differently with another 13 years of life experience under my belt. And I loved it.

I've been trying to think how to explain what it was that mesmerized me about The Great Gatsby. Books draw me in for different reasons - they are beautifully written, they tell a compelling story, they have characters I can relate to unusually well. None of those really stand out to me as being true of The Great Gatsby. What stands out to me is that it is all so simple. It was candid and straightforward. There wasn't a lot of background information or flowery description, and yet Fitzgerald still managed to evoke time and place and character so well and effortlessly that I couldn't help but immerse myself. Maybe part of this was because it was so simple. I could just be there, without distraction.

There are many things that I liked about the novel, but one of the things I liked most was the narrator, Nick Carraway (though he is seldom actually named). I liked him as a person from his first description of himself, but I liked him still more as a plot device. On the surface, Nick plays no immediately necessary role in the drama, centered on his neighbor Gatsby, that is unfolding around him. And yet he is absolutely crucial to the story. The entire novel rests on the existence of a peripherally involved and partially detached narrator with compelling reasons to be involved in the "action," whose choices don't actually affect the action itself - and one has the sense at the end that it could not possibly have been told, meaningfully, in any other way.

In the end, I found The Great Gatsby deeply sad in a way that I don't remember feeling entirely as a teenager. I had forgotten before the final chapter that Gatsby is a tragedy, and in the final pages the tragedy of the novel felt very real and very sad.

I never made it to the book club meeting that I read this book for (dissertation deadlines got in the way), but I'm glad I had the chance to return to this high school novel anyway. I don't do that very often, and I think that by assuming that I have already experienced a book because I read and discussed it as a fifteen-year-old high school student, I am missing out. There really is something to be said for your perspective changing as you grow older. Maybe I should pick this one up again in another twenty or thirty years.