Everybody loves Jay Gatsby, it seems: a mysterious, self-made, self-invented man, probably a criminal, who has made a heap of money, throws lavish parties, and is an unrequited lover who gazes with yearning towards a green light on the other side of the bay. And certainly, he’s a romantic, elegant figure compared to today’s US billionaires.
A page from Nicki Greenberg’s 2007 graphic novel interpretation of Fitzgerald’s classic.
Fans can be obsessive. Andrew Clark, who describes himself as a “Gatsby weirdo”, has listened to the audiobook about 200 times. He accepts it’s a strange thing to do: “Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat?” he writes in an essay for The New York Times.
The novel has become many things to him: “an epic poem, a hard-boiled chivalric fable, a tale in which all the heroic and extraordinary deeds seem modern for being ironic, including the lesson that greatness lies in the past … yet all the heroic efforts to recapture it are doomed”. Which is a pretty good summary of a novel that is almost impossible to sum up.
I have many favourite scenes in the book. One is when a party guest with owl-eye spectacles admires the library in Gatsby’s mansion. These are real books, he announces, not fake cardboard ones. “Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages.”
