Ruth Leon recommends… The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel? It’s certainly one of them and it was published exactly 100 years ago this week, on April 10, 1925. It epitomises and emblemises the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties, with its riotous parties and pursuit of instant gratification at all costs.

At its centre is Jay Gatsby, a man from nowhere with an invented history and apparently unlimited riches, who falls in love with Daisy, another man’s wife, and pursues her to destruction. His estate, on the North Shore of Long Island, is the setting for his hedonistic lifestyle, money is no object, there is too much of everything in his life. But at his core there is a void which he tries to fill with his extravagance, his rich friends, his parties and his obsession with Daisy.

An outsider, journalist Nick Carraway, is drawn into the captivating world of the super-rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. Bearing witness to this new world, Nick, Fitzgerald’s alter ego, writes the story of impossible love and unforgettable tragedy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by his own failed teenage obsession with a socialite heiress, Genevra King, whose father put a stop to their romance by telling him, “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls”. He never forgot her and immortalised her as Daisy Buchanan, the love of Jay Gatsby’s life, in The Great Gatsby.

The novel’s themes of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream, were little noted at the time of publication in 1925 but The Great Gatsby has, over the years, taken its place at the core of American literary scholarship.

Surprisingly, despite favourable reviews, The Great Gatsby was not a success, selling far fewer copies than his previous novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned and Fitzgerald himself regarded it as a failure which sent him further into the alcoholic spiral which eventually killed him.

There have been many stage and screen adaptations of the The Great Gatsby including the current big Broadway musical heading for the West End. Better, but not by much, is the 2013 film by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo De Caprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Toby Maguire as Nick Carraway which is available to buy or rent as is the 1973 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

Better by far is just to read the book. Even if there were not overtones of our own times, and still relevant warnings of the dangers of conspicuous consumption, it is still, no doubt at all, the Great American Novel.

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