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It's 1922 and Nick Carraway is moving from Chicago to the East Coast and a new job in New York City in the "bond business". He finds a house to rent on Long Island Sound, on the less fashionable West Egg; his second cousin once removed, Daisy Buchanan, lives on the East Egg with her filthy rich husband, the chauvinist and serial philanderer, Tom. Nick goes to visit them and their young houseguest, Jordan Baker, a professional woman golfer, and learns the reason for all the tension in the house: Tom's latest affair is with the wife of a garage mechanic, Myrtle Wilson, who keeps calling the house (so Daisy believes; it is in fact Mr Wilson, who wants to buy one of Tom's cars).

Nick's neighbour on the West Egg is Jay Gatsby, who lives in a new, gaudy mansion directly across the sound from Daisy's house. Almost every weekend, hordes of people arrive for the biggest party Nick's ever seen. After a few weeks, Nick receives an invitation to join them, and at Gatsby's house he discovers that almost no one actually knows Jay Gatsby - people just turn up, having heard of it from others. It's rarely the same people each time, even. And people repeat the craziest rumours about Mr Gatsby, such as that he killed a man, and speculate wildly about where his immense wealth comes from (most are sure it's nothing legal). When Nick finally meets the great Gatsby, he isn't sure what to think, but he considers himself a tolerant man and tries to suspend judgement.

With Jordan as an intermediary, Nick learns that Gatsby was once a beau of Daisy's before the war, and wants Nick's help in setting up a private meeting where he can see her again. From there, things escalate, someone dies, and the truth about Jay Gatsby changes everything for Nick, who has to decide where his friendship and his loyalties really lie.

Earlier this year I mentioned wanting to re-read this before the new Baz Luhrmann movie came out at Christmas 2012; as I write this I learned that it's been pushed back to May 2013. Shame, I'm really looking forward to seeing it and had hoped to over the Christmas holidays, but I can wait. For sure, Luhrmann is the best director for a new adaptation, with his track record of beautiful cinematography, flamboyant set design and knack for capturing the poignant, quiet moments amid the chaos. The excesses of the period, and Jay Gatsby's life in particular, are brought to life in the film very well, judging by the previews.

As I said, I had read this before, years ago while at uni (not for a course, just for me). It made no real impression on me, sadly, since I've never been able to remember much about it at all, and a book that forgettable must be, surely, rather lame. (Based on a vague memory of reading it the first time, I wrote this when I added the book to my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ library: "Read this years ago while at uni and didn't like it, though I remember there being some lovely bits of prose. Still, I want to re-read it, so I finally picked up a copy. We'll see.") Well I have to wonder, now that I've read it about 13 years later, just what was wrong with me. How could I have forgotten all of this? It was like reading it for the first time - which was great, but the thought did nag at me, that I was rather disappointed in myself. My younger self, anyway. It's certainly true that with many books, when (at what stage in your life) you read a book can go a long way to influencing how much you enjoy it.

For such a slim novel, there is a lot of interesting stuff crammed in here. My copy was one I'd picked up secondhand, and I hadn't realised when I got it that there were notes and marking throughout, in pencil, from some student - I absolutely hate it when people do that, because their own comments keep intruding and getting in the way. It's like watching a movie at the cinema with someone sitting near you who keeps making comments, interrupting your own enjoyment and your own thoughts. I started rubbing them out after a while, but you can never really get rid of them (I plan on getting a new copy, only there are so many editions available, which one should I get?). The person was clearly focused on writing an essay about class consciousness and the American dream, with notes like this: "The book is largely about social class and the failure of the American dream" and "Myrtle's apt. a parody of Gatsby's house and social class" and "Daisy is the embodiment of the American dream for Gatsby." Which is a perfectly fine argument (remember, the key to studying English is this: you can argue anything you like, as long as you can back it up), but this other person's voice kept interrupting my own train of thought, and the path my own mind was on in its own interpretation. The direction my mind was going, as I read this, was a little beyond classism and the attainment of the American Dream - clearly a theme, but a bit of a cliche - to this main word: Illusion.

Throughout the novel, the main theme that encompasses all others is "illusion". The illusion of wealth and happiness, the illusion of grandeur, the illusion of happiness, the illusion that Jay Gatsby lives for - and not just him, though his is the one that drives the plot forward. Everyone in this book is suffering from a case of pretending, of putting on an act, of being someone they're not - or maintaining the illusion of what they want people to see. The illusion of Jay Gatsby is the strongest, because he has the farthest to go - from humble origins to the kind of man he thinks Daisy wants, and then around again in a circle to the illusion of Daisy as a young girl, the Daisy he's been chasing after all these years.

As I went over to say good-bye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusions. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart. [pp.92-3]

Jay Gatsby isn't even Jay Gatsby, and his wealth isn't the old money of those from the East Egg, but dodgy new money, spent vulgarly in an attempt to raise himself up. From his fake "old sport" affectation to his fake Oxford education, the truth about Jay Gatsby is something only Nick Carraway learns about - everyone else sees an illusion, either the one Gatsby wanted them to see or one they've created themselves. (It reminds me of the double illusion of Victor Victoria, in which Julie Andrews pretends to be a man pretending to be a woman, called Count Victor, and it works because everyone thinks he's a fake - as in, not a real count. No one ever realises that he is really a she, because they're too busy looking at the illusion in the magician's right hand, to see the one in his left. Love that movie, by the way.)

I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then [at age seventeen]. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. [p.95]

It is not just Jay Gatsby and the circle of people Nick Carraway spends so much time with during this period, but pretty much everyone else Nick encounters. It speaks to a bigger illusion: the illusion of the American Dream - something you can say easily in this day and age, with hindsight and presentism, but that doesn't undermine its illusory quality. Everyone was chasing something, and America was one of those places where it all seemed obtainable - and where the success stories, like Gatsby's, only seemed to reinforce the illusion.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know - though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, ernest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. [p.43]

The theme of illusion is strong with the Buchanan's and their friend Jordan Baker; Jordan maintains the illusion of the quintessential 20s socialite and professional woman, who drives badly and dangerously (the illusion of immortality) and who cheats at golf - because the illusion of success is more important than sportsmanship or honour. The more Nick comes to know these people, the less he likes them, until at the end when they fail at the most basic level of human decency (attending a funeral for someone they knew), he gives up on them completely. The sense that everything is fake is tangible, and makes everything sour in Nick's mouth. At the end, the only person he still feels respect for is Gatsby - though the cynical part of me wonders if that would have soured too, if he'd known him longer or under different circumstances.

As a final nod to the theme I'm going with here of illusion, is this scene between Gatsby and Nick:

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: 'I never loved you.' After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house - just as if it were five years ago.
'And she doesn't understand,' he said. 'She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours--'
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'
'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.'
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ... [pp.105-6]

(Don't you just love that parallel between Gatsby's feelings and the "desolate path of ... discarded favors and crushed flowers"?)

One of the exceptional things about this novel is the sense of atmosphere, time and place that Fitzgerald evokes, and captures in fine detail. Throughout the story, there's this neat balance between realism and embellishment for the sake of literary drama, and the realism in particular seems so effortless, so natural and present, that while you're reading it you can, sometimes, forget you're not living in the 1920s yourself.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. [p.57]

It was perhaps Nick's affinity with the loneliness that goes hand-in-hand with the new growth of big cities and anonymous desk jobs, that gave him the empathy - or at least the sympathy - towards Jay Gatsby. While at the very beginning of the novel, Nick refers to himself as a tolerant person, he is of course just as judgemental as everyone else. And it was hard to keep up with who he liked or disliked - after the car accident, when Gatsby cares only for Daisy, Nick seems to feel only contempt for him. How or why it changed, I didn't quite grasp - perhaps on another re-read that would become clear.

There is so much to discuss with this novel. Unlike my experience reading his unfinished , or even his exceptional but depressing , I had a thoroughly positive experience reading The Great Gatsby, from my enjoyment of the overall plot and characters, to the quite wonderful prose and the deeper themes inherent in the story. Fitzgerald's success lies primarily with keeping this book so much shorter than his others - I may have enjoyed Tender... more if it had been this short and concise. There's no waffling or flowery descriptions; everything seems precisely written, for a purpose. I don't expect great things from novels that are lauded as landmark fiction, classics that are much beloved: I don't like a book just because everyone else does. I make a book work for me. And I like a book that makes me work just as hard, if not harder. The Great Gatsby is one of those rare books that is deceptively simple, telling a surprisingly plain story that - not disguises, but reveals, a great deal about a culture and a psyche and a way of life. Fitzgerald shows just how much you can achieve when you keep things short and simple, and how great talent can hide within plain writing. (I am slightly hungover right now, so please excuse my inability to capture quite what I mean. This'll have to do, for now.)