With the new hip-hop 3-D "Great Gatsby" crash-landing this week, New York magazine's Kathryn Schulz blasts the actual book, avowing that she's read F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel five times without pleasure.
While engaging in the tiresome game of shooting down American classics - the same has been done with "A Catcher in the Rye" and "Huckleberry Finn" - Schulz makes valid points. The book is simplistic and contrived, and Gatsby's attraction to Daisy is more adolescent fantasy than complex adult love. Like "Catcher" a gateway book for high school readers, "Gatsby" lacks the sophistication of "Anna Karina," "Madame Bovary" and "Swann's Way." Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" displays more depth.
Shulz does give Fitzgerald credit for his lapidary writing. I was puzzled by her statement that she finds no wit or humor in "Gatsby." The narrator Nick Carraway's wit and style were the main attractions of the book when I and my friends read it for the first time 40 years ago at the dawn of its resurgence to prominence. Shulz is right that the characters represent types; I always thought that Fitzgerald intended a satirical take on American culture and its mistaking money for culture. Somehow, Shulz misses this.
A main point of the book is American shallowness compared with Europe, that Gatsby's attempts to manufacture elegance and refinement are doomed to failure. Shulz flails away at "Gatsby" and lands a few blows, but fails to land a knockout.
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