San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New ways to analyze “The Great Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby” is sometimes described as the best novel of the past 100 years, but Greil Marcus isn’t the sort to settle on such a pat label.
To him, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterwork is something more useful: the ideal framework for a discussion about this country’s conflicted soul. “Gatsby,” writes the revered cultural critic, “works as both a grounding and a locus point for anyone’s consideration of the American subject — the deadly dance between America’s promises and their betrayal.”
Before deciding to stick with “Gatsby,” Fitzgerald thought he might call his novel “Under the Red White and Blue.” Ninetyfive years later, Marcus, a longtime Berkeley resident, has appropriated the title for his characteristically insightful new book.
In certain quarters, Fitzgerald’s lyrical tale of curdled love and conspicuous consumption in the Jazz Age is treated like a sacred text. Marcus admires the book but wants to return it to ground level. He does this by exploring its themes and influence from oblique angles. A polymath who writes with enviable fluency about music, literature, politics and the place where the mainstream meets the counterculture, Marcus applies a Fitzgeraldian lens to a host of disparate artistic developments, interweaving them in enlightening, idiosyncratic fashion.
Marcus finds echoes of “Gatsby” in the identitybased questions raised in “Mad Men” and Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” He pivots from what might be the novel’s most unnerving scene, in which one of Fitzgerald’s characters praises a white supremacist text, to an appreciation of Jelly Roll Morton, the African American pianist and Fitzgerald contemporary. And he offers a taxonomy of the “Gatsby”inspired characters that appear in the hardboiled crime novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
Marcus devotes sustained analyses to two very different entertainments: “Gatz,” a sixhour play that features the book’s entire text, and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film “The Great Gatsby.” The former, he says, is a devastating expression of the “portent and dread” of Fitzgerald’s prose. The source of its power? “Now it’s a fleshandblood figure before you, carrying that physical authority, that bodily realism, binding Gatsby’s story to the country’s story, stating that they are identical.”
Like “Gatz,” Marcus says, Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” reimagines “the original without diminishing it.” Because the Australian filmmaker “didn’t seem afraid of the book,” he felt free to establish “a greater intellectual presence” for Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the novel’s narrator. This bears fruit in the movie’s final minutes, when Nick, now quite ill, arrives at Fitzgerald’s famed final sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
By then, Marcus writes, “there’s only an unanswerable apprehension of defeat — of humiliation, cynicism, ruin, waste, pointlessness.” Luhrmann’s film is like “tragedy slamming you and the country down to the ground.”
Marcus sometimes feels that “'Gatsby’ is all a common memory, in the way that Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address is a common memory.”
He may be right, but his smart, singular book gives us invigorating new ways to think about Fitzgerald’s iconic novel.