PREQUEL REPEATS THE PAST
As copyright expires, author revisits characters from Great Gatsby
Nick
Michael Farris Smith
Little, Brown
In one of the many famous moments of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, Nick warns Gatsby, “You can't repeat the past,” and Gatsby replies, incredulously, “Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
He was right, though early. On Jan. 1, 2021, the copyright on The Great Gatsby expired, and anybody can repeat it. The Fitzgerald literary estate and Scribner's, which has sold tens of millions of copies of Gatsby, no longer control this essential text of our cultural past.
Finally set loose in the public domain, Gatsby is now the common property of creative artists and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who will run faster, stretch out their arms farther. We'll see new illustrated editions, scholarly editions, cheap knock-off editions (beware) and editions with introductions by John Grisham and others.
Among the authors who waited for Fitzgerald's copyright to expire is Michael Farris Smith. Several years ago, he conceived the bold and arduous project of writing a prequel to The Great Gatsby. Now unencumbered by legal restrictions, he's published Nick, a story about the years leading up to Nick Carraway's move to Long Island, where he falls under the spell of that charming gangster.
There are abiding challenges with any attempt to augment
— or compete with — a revered text. The anxiety of influence can trigger hysterical pastiche or castrate an author's creativity.
Smith, the author of several Southern Gothic novels, is a talented writer who approaches Fitzgerald's work with reverence and close attention to detail. Anyone who knows The Great Gatsby will hear echoes of that book's luxurious melancholy, as when Smith writes, “Nick sat with his memories in a way that others sat with photographs of wives or children, holding the worn edges and staring at the faces as if staring into an unanswerable question.”
Smith's novel opens in France during the First World War. Against his father's advice, Nick enlisted to get away from the dull, prescribed routines of the Midwest. That plan succeeded too well: He now finds himself enduring the horrors of trench warfare, which Smith describes in a style that gracefully reflects the rhythms of Fitzgerald's prose. The carnage Nick witnesses and inflicts would be enough to shatter most men, but his trauma is exacerbated by a calamity off the battlefield. While on leave in Paris, he falls in love and dares to imagine a happy future with a woman who is “blunt and beautiful and scratching and clawing and free and bound.” But when that dream collapses in an intensely tragic way, the valley of ashes across Europe reflects his personal desolation. Creating a worthy homage to Fitzgerald's finest novel is a remarkable accomplishment, and Smith's explanation of Nick's detached personality makes perfect sense. It feels, though, more like confirmation than expansion of the original story. If Smith does no violence to The
Great Gatsby, he also breaks open little space for himself. To its own detriment, Nick remains as polite and well-behaved as Nick Carraway himself. We want a disruptive revelation; instead, we get a plausible alibi.
In the second half of the novel, Nick returns to the United States and decides on a whim to go to New Orleans instead of home. With Prohibition on the horizon, the Big Easy is a panicked celebration of decadence.
Wracked by survivor's guilt and haunted by visions of war, Nick sits in a whorehouse bar — without drinking or going upstairs. “His sole accomplishment,” he thinks, “had been to survive and even that seemed like an accident.”
He may have remained in that near catatonic state indefinitely, but one night he happens upon Judah, a fellow vet, hobbling home. Although badly scarred by poison gas on the battlefield, Judah has returned from Europe and attained a degree of power and wealth on the illicit streets of New Orleans. With a mixture of pathos and authority, Judah calls upon Nick's sympathy, and he becomes privy to the wounded man's secret griefs. Before long, Nick begins serving as an intermediary in Judah's destructive
relationship with a woman he once loved and lost.
What develops offers a macabre counterpoint to The Great Gatsby. The mansions of Long Island have been replaced by the saloons of New Orleans, and the gangster subtext is now blaring like a jazz trombone. Nick, as we've seen before, is caught between careless people who smash up things and creatures.
There's plenty of grim drama here — arson, kidnapping, murder — but for too much of this second half of the novel, the story about Judah and the woman he's violently obsessed with takes over the joint. Fitzgerald may have sometimes pushed Nick to the sidelines of his glamorous romance, but in the pages of
The Great Gatsby, Nick always remains the thoughtful narrator, the watcher simultaneously enchanted and repelled. Indeed, that's what makes the otherwise meretricious story of Gatsby and Daisy so compelling. Withdraw Nick's perspective and the lurid plot sticks out of the water like a shipwreck at low tide. By denying Nick that crucial role and pushing him aside, Smith asks that we become invested in a set of noir caricatures and their lurid spat simply for its own sake.