Yes, dear reader, you are correct. However, my guest blogger has not. Had not, that is, until this month. And because I cannot get through books very fast these days, and because it is such a rare thing to find someone who hasn't read The Great Gatsby, I am happy to introduce to you Nathan Henrion, book rep by day, aspiring writer by night, and, until recently, Gatsby virgin.
Nathan has degrees in English and Russian Literature and an MBA ("which fought to destroy the humanity in me"), and he finished writing his first novel this year. Nathan and I work at the same publishing house.

Without further adieu . . .

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In the spirit of Erin’s blog here, I decided to pick up a book I had managed not to read for my entire educational experience. That book was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is a text usually required in high school, but I had found a way to slip under the radar and avoid it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had taken the college prep or AP English courses, but still, no Gatsby for me.

I was what you might classify as “lazy” in high school, coupled with the gift of never really having to crack the spine of a textbook and pulling high marks. I remember reading the introduction to the Penguin edition of The Canterbury Tales and the back cover . . . seemed like a decent book . . . even wrote a passable paper on it. Never read it till the last year in college.

So after Erin started her blog I thought to myself, alright . . . I’m going read this book and stop being a literary fake.

Well, I honestly have to say that I do not think my life has been diminished these past 35 years by skipping it. The Great Gatsby? Huh, not so great.

The prose was lean, and at 180 pages a pretty quick read. For a look at the 1920s I guess it was all right. Decadent lifestyles in an age of easy money, hard booze, and post war euphoria.

To me, however, it appeared to be a very underdeveloped tale. The characters were as thin as the prose, and the ending (since I am the only one who has not read this, it’s not really a spoiler) was harsh, but not easy to be too empathetic for Gatsby.

I actually had to resort to googling “Why is The Great Gatsby great?” to try and discover some revelation that was obviously lost on me. Needless to say, I just ran into a bunch of Fitzy fanatics.

It is interesting that the story was received rather poorly when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it, and only came to prominence in the 1960s—the time that all our English instructors received their education, and then subsequently created the lesson plans they were going to teach from for the next 40 years. Perhaps the moral ambiguity of the tale fit that generation more than any other, and speaks more for the baby-boomers’ aspirations than the actual quality of the writing. The “you are right if it feels right” lessons fitting in more at Haight-Asbury than a New York speakeasy. Then again, that seemed to be the mood of the 1920s too. The Great Depression and WWII shifted people’s perspective more conservatively, only to rebound after people got sick of “Happy Days” living.

And so, maybe that is why it is considered a great American novel, because ultimately, “you are right if it feels right” seems to be the American creed.

I find it a bit interesting that this is required reading in high school. Alcoholism, adultery, materialism, murder, suicide . . . well, I guess that is today’s high school environment, isn’t it?

So this is just my opinion. I’m sure some of you enjoyed this book, I just don’t fall into that camp. Of the books I have read that explore the conflicts between indulgence and attainability, I am just of the opinion that others have executed their stories better.

The theme comparison that came to mind was from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky . . . affluent society thinking themselves “good” but self destructing, an age of decadent lifestyle by the elite. At 600+ pages, this is obviously a more in depth character study than Gatsby. Reading 1850-1860 Russian literature really set the mark for me in looking at stories that expose the flaws of idealism and dream chasing.

So naturally the examination in Fitzgerald’s piece came across as very underdeveloped to my taste.