I never thought I would enjoy reading ‘Gatsby’ after high school
Oh, “The Great Gatsby,” that venerable habitué of AP English classes in the 1990s (and possibly still). In memory the book stretches almost interminably from September through January of an academic year, though in reality we probably only spent a month on it — a month ferreting out the symbolism of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg and the green light at the end of the dock, like juvenile miners digging away blindly in the darkness of Great Literature.
Because of this, the whole novel for me had a curiously encoded quality to it, as if Fitzgerald had written a story that was only incidentally a story but was primarily a series of symbols and characterizations carefully strung together to convey a message — uh, something about the American Dream? We wrote essays on it, for which I received As, but if anyone had ever asked me what I thought of the book, I doubt I could have done more than stammer something about the imagery of the valley of the ashes.
This was a pattern that was to be repeated in one form or another throughout my formal education. In college, I read everything from Milton’s “Lycidas” to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and in every instance the book or poem (the text, as I learned to call it) was a kind of jungle in which we were to hunt big game: find the image, find the trope, find the feminist critique. Again, I was good at this — it was like being good at “Where’s Waldo?” — but with education comes a little less fire, a little less love. I lived in books as a kid; now I could close read a poem with confidence and ease, but ask me what I found compelling about Robert Lowell (not that anyone ever did) and I’d draw a blank: no opinion, no emotion. At my first real job after graduation, as an editor at a literary magazine, I was asked to evaluate a batch of poems, and I remember feeling like I’d suddenly been shoved out onto a bridge over a chasm without any handholds.
That was a long time ago. I hadn’t thought about “The Great Gatsby” in years, until recently I was on a plane to California where Baz Luhrman’s 2013 adaptation was part of the in flight lineup. I watched in amazement: Was this what the book had been about all these years? Poor Daisy Buchanan, so abused by her lousy husband but also by her lover Jay Gatsby — and yet so weak you couldn’t help but despise her too. And the narrator, Nick Carraway — supposedly the good guy, but in the end just Gatsby’s chauvinistic chump.
The sudden swell of opinions drove me straight to my bookshelf when I got home, and this time, “Gatsby” was everything I had missed the first time around: a story of class desperation, a beautifully drawn portrait of deluded idealism, a critique of the moneyed classes and a melancholy love letter to what Fitzgerald terms “the West” — as well as a dismaying look at Fitzgerald’s own casually embedded antisemitism and complicated racism. Every strand of my reading life suddenly came together in that one rereading — both the childhood pleasure and the adult critical skills. It only took 25 years, but I was grateful in that moment to be old enough to look again.