Book Review: What I thought of Gatsby

First I have to explain I am talking about the book The Great Gatsby, not the recent movie.  I’ve read the book now three times; I still feel unsettled about it.  This time around, I checked the book out of the local library, along with an audio version; when the CD occasionally refused to play correctly, I could listen to the recording.
 

I had notice before that Gatsby is a short book; I don’t know how many words, but it prints under two hundred pages—is it even a “novel” at all?  This time, I also noticed that it only contains nine chapters.  I didn’t count the scenes, but there aren’t many.  This gives it a compact, structured quality.  We know from books like The Last Tycoon that Fitzgerald carefully considered questions of “point-of-view” and issues of whether to present stories sequentially or via flashbacks.  Both approaches are used in Gatsby.

“First” (actually third) impressions:  I’m still a bit foggy about Gatsby’s past, and I get the impression that other readers are as well.  People say he was a bootlegger; my impression is that he just got in well with gangsters and made a lot of money by “being of service.”  At the end of the book it seems one of Gatsby’s associates has been arrested in some kind of sting operation.

Besides what I call “The Fog of Gatsby,” other points about this book frustrate me.  Could Gatsby really make so much money in so short a time, so mysteriously?  Well—maybe.

More importantly, I’ve never understood the pivotal events of the plot.  Gatsby and Tom trade cars for obscure reasons.  Daisy drives Gatsby’s car at the climax of the book.  Why?

Are these characters believable?  Generally, they aren’t believable for me.

Then there’s the question of why I should care about these characters—I don’t, really; it’s not really clear why the narrator does.  Gatsby wants be rich so he can dazzle Daisy and win her back from Tom.  Daisy has a voice and way of speaking that captivates men somehow—but does she have any substance?  When Gatsby shows her the shirts in his wardrobe, she buries her face in them and exclaims “How lovely!”

Nick, the narrator, doesn’t seem a bad fellow; but he makes all sorts of dubious declarations.  He says that Gatsby represents everything for which he has an unaffected scorn—but suggests Gatsby is gorgeous—a “series of successful gestures?”  He says “Gatsby turned out all right at the end”—certainly debatable points!

Perhaps like Fitzgerald’s writing; it dazzles with adjectives and adverbs and beauty.  But—I often found myself thinking:  Ah that is beautiful—beautiful!  But…what is he saying?  What does he mean?  “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  I always enjoy reading this book—I’ve read it now three times, after all.  But I always end up thinking:  What??