Homer Simpson wrote the best review of Gatsby:
I think the author of this review only wanted to show off all the big words he found when he opened a dictionary.
NOBODY speaks like that in real life.
...and the book is the most overrated book in history bordering on booring.
The author of this review is exactly the type of pretensious person Gatsby is critiquing. No wonder they don’t “get it” or like it.
Blah, blah, blah. I liked the book. It is considered witty to bash famous books. The movies generally were not so hot, but I liked the scene in the Redford/Gatsby version where he got plugged in the pool.
Homer Simpson wrote the best review of Gatsby:
I thought the book was pretty good; had some great images.
But it’s The Great American Novel? I hope not.
All horsepoop. “Sometimes a Great Notion”. Ken Kesey. THE Great American Novel. Period.
Was this book the inspiration for “White Trash with Money”?
I’m glad to see that at least someone else thinks “The Great Gatsby” is one of the most over-rated books in history. I hated it, hated all of the characters. If there’s no one to sympathize with, what’s the point?
-— He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-person sanctimonious. -—
Ouch!
The Brothers Karamazov spoiled me. Gatsby pales in comparison.
I did not read the book but saw the Reford movie. I walked away feeling that I had wasted my time watching it. It was empty, no real plot and went nowhere.
I had the same feeling when I saw, “Out Of Africa”. A story about a promiscuous female who died of syphillis? Can someone tell me the ‘point’ of that movie?
“Let us show our friendship for a man when he is alive, not after he is dead” Meyer Feldman
Frankly, I think her criticisms nail it: No likable, or even fun-to-hate characters; preachy, yet emotionally aloof and amoral; envious of the people it hates.
I remember this about TGG: Laz once spammed a troll’s thread with the entire first chapter of TGG. It remains, to this day, one of the longest single posts on FR.
This was before the Mods, and Jim had to zot the trolls by himself.
Two books show us that, one fiction and the other non-fiction: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Right Stuff.
I like “Tender is the Night” or “This Side of Paradise” better than “Gatsby.” I can’t read the book without seeing Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy — blecccccch! And the author is right about some of the heavy-handed symbolism, the shallow archetypal characters, and the absurd plot contrivances. But I can’t say I hate it. I just think Fitzgerald did better.
Could not agree more with the author of this article. Gatsby makes my eyes glaze over just thinking about it. Simply dreadful, uninspired, and soulless.
Gatsby is America.
He’s a poor boy from fly-over country who wants to better himself. He changes his name from the unpleasant Jimmy Gatz to the elegant Jay Gatsby. America is where anyone can reinvent himself.
The Army gives him a chance. Gatsby is smart and resourceful and is promoted to major. There is no class system in the military (just like there’s no official class system in America). You can rise to whatever level you’re smart enough to reach.
In a uniform, Gatsby is welcome at the homes of the rich and fabulous. He meets and wins a famous Southern belle — but can’t have her, because the war ends and he isn’t an officer anymore and she’s afraid to be poor.
He becomes a successful criminal, because he needs big money fast to win back Daisy.
It all falls apart. But other Americans have succeeded wildly where Gatsby failed.
The Great Gatsby is a distilled glimpse of the beauty and promise of America. That’s all it is, and all it’s about.
And if you can’t see that, or even FINISH SUCH A SHORT BOOK, sit down and be quiet. The grown-ups are talking about America’s greatest novel.
Oh, jeez! The woman presents a detailed, and in my view persuasive critique of the work, and what do we have to say to counter her criticisms? “I’ve always liked it” and “hidden communist agenda”?
Full disclosure: I never liked it, never disliked it, never quite understood its appeal, ignored it. But that’s just moi.
I never could force myself to read it. Before this thread, all I knew was that it involved someone named Gatsby and was set somewhere in the general vicinity of New York City. I never saw the movie either. So for me this has been a useful critique.
Of all the novels I haven't read yet, I think there are quite a few that I want to get to sooner than The Great Gatsby.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
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I guess this is sort of like when you say a word over and over again until it starts to have no meaning. If you read something over and over again or hear about it time and time again and see it used as a key to the American experience, it's going to leave you cold after a while.
Academics like to pretend that they can read the same book over and over again year after year and still discover things in it. But that's just something they tell students to encourage them. Plenty of teachers and professors go mad from having to read the same books over and over again. Of course it doesn't help if one is particularly shallow, but even deep people want a change every once in a while.
What she's basically saying is she's tired of Gatsby and she starts comparing it to other, very different works and finding it wanting. Gatsby isn't James or Proust or whoever. Read it on its own terms. Take it for what it is, not for what it isn't or couldn't be (and remember that T.S. Eliot called it "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James").
My suggestion to her is: apply the same standards to other books. Compare Gatsby to ten novels published this year or ten novels published in 1925. Compare it to Fitzgerald's other novels. Tell me if Gatsby is really worse than comparable works. If you're as critical of everything as she is of Gatsby, chances are you won't find anything really worth reading.
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This week I found out something new about Gatsby. The end of the book I read in school had a sentence: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." This week I found out that Fitzgerald actually wrote "orgastic."
His Princeton friend, the critic Edmund Wilson assumed this was a misspelling -- Fitzgerald was a horrible speller and a much worse student than Wilson -- and "corrected" it to "orgiastic." If you think about it a while, it says a lot about both men which word they chose.