Fuck 'The Great Gatsby'

Where do I sign up to dunk on 100 years of one of the most overrated novels ever written?

In the spirit of celebrating 100 years of attention spent on one of the most overrated novels ever written, please enjoy the semi-uncut (but definitely still edited down) version of my essay, “Actually, The Great Gatsby is Trash” (not my title) originally published at Vice in 2017.

I always thought it was weird how they solicited me to write this but then didn’t let me say what I actually said. It would be great if more magazines stopped worrying about readers not being able to do anything right, and forcing writers having to constantly attend to only timely materials, like because they are in the news again trying to sell ‘freshly discovered’ F. Fitzgerald jottings or on their bloat anniversaries. XO

Image created by an intern at Vice I presume

Amid the shortlist of books most everybody gets forced to read in high school, it would be easy to argue that The Great Gatsby is the most famous and definitive. Its legacy goes hand in hand with the long-running idea of the “great American novel,” one so ensconced in framing the image of who we think we are that its name gets passed on by the stamp of its canonical concreteness. It’s a book even people who gave up reading sometime around when they started screwing still recognize the legacy of, if for no other reason than a book that’s lasted so long must be great, must have something definitive about it to explain how so much American writing in its wake has strived to follow in its footsteps, to meet its benchmark.

What the hell is a Great American Novel anyway? What makes anyone think that some massive and singular predefined standard is or could be something we all want, much less a standard to aspire after? The only underlying qualities of such a creation have only ever seemed to me, in having their legacy pressed upon us, to be relatively easy to read (because in America we only ever seem to really love things we feel we can nail down, and therefore understand), conceptually “universal” (that is, to a very certain kind of person, of a certain class, amongst whom the sort of person who might be in a position to help contour some kind of canon feels at home), and from which we take learn a lesson by example (because all stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, amid which as we read we experience some kind of growth or aspiration, some kind of sense of easily underlined and regurgitated metaphor held up amid the everyday, despite life itself hardly ever fitting in such easy outlines; thus making the very construct of the novel as it might be in all honestly more and more irrelevant both as art (because so much of it feels like bullshit, and like an echo) and entertainment (because who has the time these days to play along? No one). In the end, then, if language isn’t doing something only language by itself can do, there’s not so much Great or Novel about a creation; it is simply then only American.

I, for one, hadn’t read Fitzgerald in 20 years and hadn’t planned to before the advent of a whole new slew of Fitzgerald’s previously undiscovered wank. I couldn’t even remember why I hadn’t exactly loved it years before, feeling only a vague lingering effect, little more than its name. How had The Great Gatsby continued to stand the test of time, besides its ubiquity in curriculums? What about Gatsby gave it grounds for being called, as had Time Magazine, “one of the most quintessentially American novels ever written”?

What I found, in my rereading, was not what I would call great writing, or even necessarily sharp writing, but the mirage of such. Somehow, since its 1925 publication, Fitzgerald’s prose seems to have grown bloated, decorously written yet so bland that it feels like it requires a translation, from purple to purposeful. The book’s certainly not poetic, nor is it particularly well-paced, mostly either digressing about upbringing or meandering through the motions of yet another bourgeois day. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,” Nick admits up front, on the first page. “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

What is he trying to “snobbishly” warn us of, I wonder? That if we don’t see the value in the story he’s about to tell, it’s we, the readers, who have the problem? At once, then, we can detect the foundations of the myth of Gatsby: Here is a prick of a book we have for too long been afraid to simply call a prick and walk away.

Nick, by the way, is a young, well-to-do white guy, allegedly straight, who has taken it upon himself to affectively and ongoingly mansplain his basic life plan to the reader like some scotch-breathed friend of a friend at a dinner party you should have skipped. We’re supposed to be along for the ride with this guy, or so it seems—he’s neither so unlikeable as to have a temperature, nor likeable enough we hope he turns out okay in the end, like human wallpaper—a state of being which should be understood up front as devoid of irony: These were the kind of people F. Scott Fitzgerald surrounded himself with in daily life, in admiration, depicted in a work whose climate he described to his editor Maxwell Perkins as “a sincere and yet radiant world.” Even in looking back, we should not see the flaws in these characters’ outlooks or practices as caricature, or even criticism, but instead as a tale intended to reveal the troubled intersection of their dreams, to feel their yearning, however misplaced; to write it all off now as satire or even foreboding would be to gift it context it does not mean to earn.

Before we go further, let's get a grip on what actually happens in this novel, which, spoiler alert, is very little. Its plot, like so much realist narrative fiction, is easily boiled down to a handful of bullshit tacked together around some semblance of “character motivations.” I was surprised to realize in my rereading how much of this already relatively short novel was all but skimmable, in that it was neither particularly memorably written—“And as I walked on I was lonely no longer,” Nick says, for instance, in feeling immodestly pleased with himself after giving a random dude directions. “I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”—nor did it really seem to go anywhere but in circle of catty gossip, none of it hot.

I mean, here’s The Great Gatsby’s nine chapters, in a nutshell:

• 1: Hi, I’m Nick, a privileged dipshit bonds salesman who’s looking for fun

• 2: My cousin Daisy’s husband fucks around

• 3: Jay Gatsby is richer than the rest of us, so much so he thinks he can call people “old sport”

• 4: Gatsby fought in the war; also, he really wants to fuck my cousin

• 5: I, Nick, am down to help Gatsby fuck my cousin

• 6: Sometimes people who weren’t invited crash Gatsby’s parties; I too find myself obsessed with him

• 7: Daisy’s husband Tom isn’t cool with Jay trying to fuck her; meanwhile, I’m pretty nervous about turning 30 (P.S. car crash!)

• 8: Gatsby likes Daisy more than just for fucking; Daisy’s feelings remain unclear (and who really cares what women want?)

• 9: Gatsby messed around and got murked; still pretty cool he used to be rich tho

So, yes, it’s essentially like the least titillating episode ever of The Real Housewives of East Egg, full of passing conversations and observations that seem to drag on as soon as they begin, occasionally interrupting itself with larger context to install a sense of metaphor about the enterprise, to give it purpose, academic-leaning meaning. “We drew in deep breaths of [air] as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules,” Fitzgerald writes, “unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.” Translation: “Sometimes even rich people feel sad and lonely,” which, sure, it maybe a good lesson for the multitudes of types of comely sociopaths our country tends to breed. If The Great Gatsby is indeed so definitively American, it proves so in a way like American Psycho without the comedy or the gore; becoming instead again another who’s fucking who and who wants to be fucking who tale, phrased in the most lame and sexless possible way, a novel among thousands; which, you know, sure, is actually American as shit.

Speaking of Americans, did I mention that several of these characters are white nationalists? “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race,” says Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, “to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” “‘We’ve got to beat them down,’” Daisy concurs, cementing such an outlook as part and parcel of the emotional marrow of the novel that she becomes, all while revealing much of nothing else about her but her looks. “We’re all white here,” Nick’s date Jordan offers later, to attempt to calm down a fight between the men, as if that fact alone should end the struggle over who owns Daisy’s heart. So, a sexist, racist, realist, vacuous tedium is the definitive American novel? Well, yes, Blake; yes, indeed. But perhaps a better title might have been The Great White Gatsby, to be sold as a coming-of-age story for Jared Kushner, one in which family means Richard Spencer and role model means a murdered cheese-ball playboy.

Can we just please at last say fuck these people? And fuck their story, fuck its author; fuck this book. Regardless of how it evokes some state of how things were, for certain people, perhaps even still in some ways for how they are, its position as an icon among language-based ambition has long gone stale, so “safe” it’s become sickly, like rotten food. At this point, it’s little more than work whose foundational position evokes, by simply withstanding, a continuously reinforced aesthetic barbarism, devoid of mystery, the sublime. Because, as literary fiction, Gatsby holds up the table for everything we’ve been told for decades books are “supposed to do”: to set up what’s going to happen at the end of the story on the very first page (because you, dear reader, must be stupid); to display in tedious detail who is speaking and where they are and why (as if persons were only ever meant to be a set of social coordinates); its skeletal design then propped up with sentimental passages of backstory inserted in random spots that we couldn’t care less to hear about, reinforcing what we already knew (which, in this case, appears to be: “Rich people exist within nature”), filled out with meandering dialogue you can all but skim over and lose nothing. I can really feel myself getting dumber as I read it, almost like drowning, which is perhaps exactly why it has become inculcated by American schools as a cornerstone of the foundation of our learning: Most media is meant to numb you out, to make you care more about its prototype so they can sell you more—all while pretending you’re not really just waiting for the words to end so that you can get back to Netflix, pop your meds, then pass the fuck out.

Which, to me, brings the conclusion that Gatsby is not only not a great novel, but one by which the continued CPR over its legacy has only done us all a psychic damage, both literarily and as a culture. There might have been a time when The Great Gatsby seemed newfangled or boundary-breaking, or even just a solid literary book, but in our current landscape, it’s a barely passable melodrama, one played out by dick-bag socialites and white supremacists, satire or not; nothing attempted, nothing lost. Reread The Great Gatsby as an adult who has read outside of the canonical framework we’re presented and you’ll realize why so many young people hate to read; because, if nothing else, they can just as easily absorb the exact same sort of story on most any channel on TV. What good’s an imagination, after all, when our “greatest novels” seem secondhand to reality’s script? Perhaps, then, it’s time to throw simple nostalgia aside and hand over those dead idols.