The Not-So-Great Gatsby

Sounds Good!

I’ve never liked The Great Gatsby, never been able to see the fuss. I first read it at school – I understood it enough to pass the test, to write the essay, answer the exam-questions and I took it seriously enough to watch the 1974 film adaptation (the one with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford). It might be the best filmed version, but it still didn’t sit with me for long.

A couple of years later I’m re-reading Gatsby, not so much for pleasure but for university study. And again, I pass the test, I write the essay. I rewatch the movie.

But it’s cold. And I don’t respond to it the way I do to the study of the Beats, the New Journalism, and the other delights from American Literature.

I have a third read of it when I am finishing my degree – many years later (after time off for not so good behaviour) and I take a 300-level American Lit paper to nail down that once elusive B.A. Gatsby is in there as side-line reading. I re-read On The Road (which is okay, and quite possibly hugely overrated also) but I get it; can admire the frenzy and madness of it. Gatsby, again, just leaves me cold.

But on a third strike you might say the fault is mine, not Fitzgerald’s.

I’ve since watched that abomination of a movie that came out in 2013. Its nearly saving grace a hammy-but-sublime performance from Leonardo DiCaprio (does he actually know any other kind of performance?)

And, weirdly, I’ve thought of reading the book again – away from any assignments.

Because something always nags.

It is a classic of literature. And yet I just don’t see it. I most certainly don’t feel it. I’m in no way traumatised by this – the classics can be wrong. Or just not right for me. There’s no issue with that. But something hangs there with Gatsby in particular. And that’s the feeling that I should like it. I should get it on a level deeper than I do.

But no.

Not yet.

And (so) probably never.

Last night I finished reading the graphic novel adaptation. It’s cleverly done. Beautifully illustrated. And I’m a fan of these graphic adaptations – they work. Usually. You get a nice taste of the text, and you see it in a different way. It takes you back to the original work (if you’ve read it) but stands up as its own thing.

I was probably hoping to feel like the graphic novel was going to be the thing to convince me. But it didn’t. Like an okay-movie adaptation it just rolled on and ticked a few boxes without ever delivering the gut-punch.

This was a Cliff’s Notes at best.

In the age of Trump’s rise and now in the fallout, with the vacuous nature of online appearances-for-living maybe Gatsby should seem all the more impressive for foreshadowing, but it feels – to me – even more hollow. Something is missing. And in a weird way I kinda like that I just don’t gel with this book.

You catch up with other classics way down the track and marvel at how you missed them at the time (To Kill A Mockingbird) or you forever hold on to who you were and where you were when you read that coming-of-age classic (The Catcher In The Rye). You feel no need to revisit, to have further explained. You are satiated. The book worked. You did the work by reading it. Or the combination.

But for me The Great Gatsby just floats out there in the harbour, lost. That searchlight on and me standing there, Martini-less, mildly stirred, and maybe just slightly shaken.

I’m okay with that now. I think I’ll leave it there. That’s me and The (not so) Great Gatsby. Can’t say I didn’t try.

Is there a classic read that you finally got to but also just didn’t get?