The Truly Great Gatsby

The boom of the 1920s has long interested me, since I first learned of the period in my early teens. Perhaps more than any other time in the 21st Century, the 1920s helped to shape the world we live in today.

I recently finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" which is an interesting portrayal of this period which he coined as The Jazz Age. It was a period of decadence, of popular entertainment through the first wave of cinema and of economic prosperity, particularly in America. It was the land of opportunity.

The 1920s is almost a historical allegory for the current economic downturn that we are facing. Everyday families played the stock market as if it was a game (and one that for the majority of the century, was easy to win) before it all ended dreadfully with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Consider the parallels with the housing market of the early 2000s and its sharp recent collapse and you can make an easy case for the parallel.

"The Great Gatsby" is more than merely a reflection of the boom of the 1920s however. I'm not going to go into the story in any great deal (you can read about it here) but I am going to describe the things that I think make it so special and far before its time.

The story of Gatsby is told through the eyes of a young man, Nick Carraway, and what I like about this is that the story is told almost completely without judgement on the central characters. This is quite unusual for a first person narrative in itself and made more so by the moral decisions that pins the plot together. The characters are so self-absorbed that they don't realise the importance of their wrong choices but at no point are we made to choose sides. By the end, Nick has made his own mind up and his allegiance is to Gatsby but the crucial thing is that the reader is afforded the option to make their own decision.

The ending is also stunning and yet at the same time, probably the reason why the book was unpopular on its release. Given the boom that the audience of 1924 were experiencing, it is perhaps only natural that they would reject the bleak and unhappy ending. At the same time, this is probably the part that helped an audience rediscover it as Fitzgerald's masterpiece after his death. Not only did it brilliantly surmise his riffs on the sanctity of marriage, of the falseness and loneliness of society and the way that things are not always as they seem but it has also inspired influential artists since. The mental image of Gatsby being shot dead in his swimming pool was almost certainly the inspiration for the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard - an iconic image that helped to redefine Hollywood in the fifties.

And finally, what drew me into the story was the entertainment of Fitzgerald's writing. It had pace, elegance and wit, yet at the same time was garnished with beautiful descriptions that in most other circumstances would slow down the novel. It was almost like it had been glossed with the modern sheen; that it was not of its time. If the same novel came out today, people would not question its writing style as being old-fashioned.

What's more at under 200 pages, it delivers an astonishing number of themes and motifs, proving that brevity is not something to be scorned. In today's publishing market, research suggests that people don't like to buy short books and more than likely, The Great Gatsby would be treated as a novella if it was written today. Not only would render it unlikely to ever receive the audience it deserves, it would also be a massive disservice to the work as a Novel in its own right.

This would be a sad indictment on modern culture. Given the parallels with the twenties, the world needs works of art like The Great Gatsby to remember that with every boom there must come a bust.