WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT JAY GATSBY?

via thinklink.com

The Great Gatsby patrols the modern world with Jay Gatsby walking point.

(Just finished Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald came in at the end. He and Papa were buddies in Paris before Zelda slipped a gear. In 2011 Paula McLaine wrote a novel called The Paris Wife about the same time. Read both books for a good look at the times.)

Students read about the exploits of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby like any other assigned book.

Teacher says read it, they read it.

The book reports explain how F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Roaring Twenties, how he preserved an era between a book cover.

Two star crossed lovers caught in the pinch of old money and new money try to reunite after WWI.

They’ll mention booze and prohibition and sort of behind the scenes look at life revealed in shocking detail.

But they miss the sort of vibe you get when you re-read The Great Gatsby today.The code words of the time reveal a racy, fast, and lethal lifestyle.

It’s cold gin in a tall glass with consequences, ending on a take of the future, the past, and the spark of salmon DNA with the line suggesting we are all, “boats against the current, born ceaselessly into the past.”

Spawning ground?

Baby boomers read The Great Gatsby in junior year high school English. It was a good time to read it.

What did high school juniors in 1972 know about adultery, white collar crime, and murder seen through an alcoholic haze?

Expensive celebrity  parties on Long Island paid for with questionable funds?

Is this Jay Gatsby or Bernie Madoff?

The Great Gatsby of 1925 relates to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from 1906.

Every one-time English major reads The Jungle. Fitzgerald did too. He had to.

Sinclair looks at America from the bottom up with poor immigrant workers; Fitzgerald’s focus starts at the top with a bond salesman living next to an extravagant rich man.

Throughout this reading I heard echoes of other stories. The nobody from nowhere turns into somebody?

Wuthering Heights?

A sexy, sweaty, auto accident cover-up, then murder/suicide?

Body Heat?

Pushing hard on Jay Gatsby and Daisy is the gulf between them, in life and an actual body of water.

Their shared dream caved to economic realities and a Dear John letter.

The girl of his dreams married a rich man and serial cheater, who she stays with instead of starting over with Jay Gatsby when she had the chance.

Like Gatsby, we need to reinvent ourselves to stay alive, too feel alive. David Bowie would agree until recently. Madonna still agrees.

Maybe part of reinvention is learning to turn the tables on yourself, to find a new angle.

Instead of remorse and failure from the past guiding you forward, use loss as a tool to reflect.

Jay Gatsby could have done better. He could have moved on, found a nice girl in the neighborhood and settled down to one of those suburban lives you hear about.

Kids, cars, soccer.

Reflect on the green light at the end of your pier, the vision you saw for your life the first time you met Jay Gatsby.

Are you the blazing comet you started out as? If so, keep up the good work.

If not, say hello to Adele. From the other side.