The Great Gatsby
1920
- married people, fiction
- american fiction (fictional works by one author)
- fiction, psychological
- long island (n.y.), fiction
- fiction
- rich people
- mistresses
- married women
- traffic accidents
- first loves
The story
Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.... It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again." It is the story of this Jay Gatsby who came so mysteriously to West Egg, of his sumptuous entertainments, and of his love for Daisy Buchanan – a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism, and is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe. It is a magical, living book, blended of irony, romance, and mysticism. \--first edition jacket --- Also contained in: - [The Fitzgerald Reader](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL468551W/The_Fitzgerald_Reader) - [Three Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL468557W)
What it’s like
Lush, sun-bleached summer glare over Long Island's water and lawns, with green lights blinking across a dark bay and the hazy gold of parties strung with lanterns and loud music. Fitzgerald's prose is the texture here: lyrical and precise, shot through with irony, every sentence polished like a cocktail glass and sometimes cutting like one. The mood is glamorous but melancholy, a bright surface over a slow undertow of longing, class anxiety and the sense that the past cannot be recovered. Read it in a warm late-summer evening, on a long train ride, or slowly over a few sittings when you want something elegant that rewards attention. Its pace is unhurried in the set pieces and abrupt in its turns, building toward a quietly devastating final stretch. The emotional register is wistful and ironic, following a restless man whose hope outruns his circumstances and a narrator who watches it all with a mixture of admiration and disdain. Violence is brief but sharp, including a car accident and a late act of brutality, with no gore, and the sexual content is implied rather than explicit. It suits readers who love stylish prose, the Jazz Age, and stories of romantic idealism colliding with money and carelessness.
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