kevincmurphy's Full Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Were I forced to rank the novelists of the Lost Generation, Francis Scott Fitzgerald would come out on top, solely on the basis of The Great Gatsby. (Faulkner is obviously very talented, but he's so damnably esoteric. Steinbeck hit his peak well after the twenties and thus is not being considered here. As for Hemingway...perhaps I'm just too much of a contemplative sort, but I never thought his writing was anything better than good. ["He did it. It was done. It was good that he did it. He did it again. Good. It was done. He went to a bullfight."])
No, Fitzgerald's my man, and, along with The Grapes of Wrath, Gatsby is the Great American novel, or at least the best American book force-fed to me in high school. I find Fitzgerald's prose hauntingly beautiful, as ghostly and ethereal as his mad wife Zelda. His words seep into your system like mist rolling off the sea at sunset, or a sidewalk saxophonist playing the blues under the full moon. [Not for nothing did Hunter S. Thompson hone his craft by retyping Gatsby page by page.]
The novel cuts to the heart of the American dream -- Jay Gatsby is a self-made man and gregarious entrepreneur in the New World spirit. Yet, his momentum is crushed upon the "invisible" rocks of class, America's dirty little secret. Daisy Buchanan's violent automobile ride acts as metaphor for her (and her social strata's) treatment of our dapper, likable protagonist. But, I don't want to give the ending away. Suffice to say, if you've never read Gatsby, I highly recommend it.
This deceptively simple work, Fitzgerald s best known, was hailed by critics as capturing the spirit of the generation. In Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald embo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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