Tender is the neck
The Chosen and the Beautiful Nghi Vo Tordotcom
Nghi Vo's adaptation of The Great Gatsby is completely ridiculous, and I love it with the passion of a thousand burning hearts.
Not only does Vo capture the timbre of Fitzgerald's lush prose, but she follows the trajectory of the novel's contrails into another realm. This is a version of The Great Gatsby in which partygoers drink demon blood, sorcery twists the beams of reality and Jay Gatsby is a bisexual vampire.
Finally, the story makes sense.
Vo hasn't wholly reimagined the Roaring Twenties, she's simply added sorcery to the decade's illicit inebriation. But all that lurid wizardry isn't the most radical element of The Chosen and the Beautiful. Vo has rotated the perspective away from Nick Carraway. We witness essentially the same events — often even the same details and dialogue — but no longer as described by the young, impressionable vet who happens to rent a “small eyesore” next to Gatsby's mansion.
No, in this otherworldly version, the narrator is Daisy's savvy friend Jordan Baker. She's still a professional golfer, as Fitzgerald originally created her, but now she's also a Vietnamese orphan plucked up as a child by a missionary in Tonkin and raised by a wealthy U.S. family. Although money and a condescending appreciation for her “exotic” beauty allow Jordan to pass in Daisy's refined circle, her race and fluid sexuality ensure that Jordan will always exist within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the people who “saved” her.
Vo's audacious amendments shift the register of The Great Gatsby, creating a story that galvanizes Fitzgerald's classic and leaves a new one vibrating alongside. It may sound counterintuitive, but Vo's introduction of witchcraft, necromancy and enchantment miraculously produces a more relevant novel than that poetic tale of a gaudy stalker and his closeted pimp that's been passed off for decades as the ultimate interrogation of the American dream. By inflating the story's most fantastical implications, it offers a timely consideration of class exploitation, sexual aggression and racial privilege.