Gatsby is one of the three most over rated books in American history. The others being Catcher In The Rye and anything by Ernest Hemingway.
“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered, “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
—Nick’s description of Daisy (and the Jazz age, if you will) from Chapter 1 of the novel.
My argument was not necessarily to say something popular is by definition, "good."
I levelled a lot of criticism against Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, not because it was popular, but because it was generally wrong and based entirely on a flawed premise...And because Umberto Eco had dealt with the same subject matter in a far more cerebral and historically accurate, Foucault's Pendulum about 20 years earlier.
If someone reads Gatsby and doesn't like it, more power to them. A lot of the crtiticism I read sounds to me like sour grapes against Fitzgerald for his success.