The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1926)

I decided I must re-read this in preparation for the film.

The tatty paperback is covered in pen underlining from my first, compulsory high school reading, and I wondered how much of my love would remain when reading through older and – possibly – more critical eyes.

Nick Carraway moves to Long Island in the 1920s and is drawn into a glamorous, seedy world lit up by his neighbour, Jay Gatsby. No-one knows much about Gatsby and they delight in making up sinister stories; but it turns out Gatsby’s secrets are very close to home.

It’s my habit to take a photo of passages I like, to save writing them all down. I wasn’t halfway through this by the time I had a couple of dozen photographs. The pen marks from the first reading showed I’d felt similarly back then.

Fitzgerald’s writing makes every line seems enchanted. When Carraway finds something lovely, you feel his wonder, and when he describes the dreadful you feel his surges of disgust.

There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life ... No – Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.

There is plenty of Fitzgerald’s dignified and deft humour in this tale – shown to best effect in his renderings of Gatsby’s drunken party guests and hangers-on.

To StuMo, shooting zombies a few feet away, it must have seemed as though I weren’t reading at all, but just sitting there, alternately giggling at and taking photos of a stationary object.

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

I don’t doubt that the beauty and ugliness of it all, not to mention Gatsby’s tortured soul, will be rendered exquisitely on film, but I wonder how the fun poked at peripheral characters, his “pale, dangling individuals” will fare.

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:  ‘Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?

At least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was, explained to him that car and wheel were no longer joined by any physical bond.

‘Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’

‘But the wheel’s off!’

He hesitated.

‘No harm in trying,’ he said.

My mate Sturdy dislikes this book. She says there’s no-one to love here, and she’s right.Oddly enough, soon after this conversation, another friend asked me whether she was supposed to find Daisy loveable, because she couldn’t. I replied that she’d hit the nail on the head: Daisy doesn’t “gleam like silver” and that’s the lightbulb moment.

Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.

For those also interested in the “likeability” problem, I direct you to something showed to me recently: the take of writers including Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen on the subject.

Likeable or not, The Great Gatsby is spine-tingling. I hang on the words, they give me goosebumps. I am breaking my neck to get into that cinema.