Alison Stewart (4:24)

Listeners, we would love to have you join this conversation. When did you first read the Great Gatsby? What were your impressions? Have you returned to the book since? Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. What do you think Gatsby represents about American culture? Do you have a favorite scene or a favorite charact? You agree or disagree that it should be taught to students in high school? Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. As you mentioned, F. Scott Fitzgerald was fairly young when he wrote this book. What do we know about his life when he was writing?

A.O. Scott (5:07)

Well, he was. I mean, he was already a quite a popular novelist. He had written, I think, this side of paradise, the Beautiful and the Damned, a book of short stories. This was his third novel. So he'd gotten his start in the early 1920s, and he was kind of like, you know, the Sally Rooney of the Jazz Age. Let's say. He was like the writer who was. Was kind of a voice of the generation. Everyone was reading him. He sort of seemed to have an ear for the way that people were talking. This was in the years after the First World War, the Great War and the Great influenza. It was a time of kind of rapid modernization, and there was certain cynicism and it was a boom time after, after years of war and pandemic. And he was somebody who was seen to have sort of captured something about the way that people, especially young people and young affluent people were living in, in those, in those. In what was being called, you know, the jazz, the Jazz Age. The thing about the Great Gatsby, he, he sort of had this idea of writing this story and, and had several other ideas for the, for the title, including Trimalchio in West Egg, which if he'd succeeded in making that the title, that's a sort of an obscure Latin literary reference. West Egg is the fictional town in Long island where it takes place. We might not be talking about the book today if it's, if he had stuck with that title, but his, his editor, Maxwell Perkins persuaded him to call it something else. Nonetheless, the book was not a success. It was kind of a failure. It, it, you know, it, the reviews were mixed to negative and nobody really expected it to last. It was sort of seen as a little bit of a, a disappointment. And, and, and it kind of was the beginning of the eclipse of, of, of Fitzgerald's career and what's, what's known about him, you know, the sort of, the things about his life that, that people remember are his, his marriage, his, his very troubled marriage to Zelda, Zelda Sayer Fitzgerald and her, her mental problems, her struggles with mental illness, his own struggles with alcoholism and his decline and early death. You know, he was, he was in his early 40s. He had gone out to Hollywood, had kind of not really made a great success there, had kind of fallen into chronic alcoholism and died, you know, feeling like a failure and having been largely forgotten by, you know, by, by critics, by the publishing world, by the literary world. And so it's one of these interesting stories. He's famous for saying there, there are no second acts in American life. And yet Gatsby and Fitzgerald's other books are an example of how that isn't true because the book was, after his death, rediscovered and has now, I think, you know, 100 years later, become one of the sort of the central books that's most talked about and most widely read, even if people aren't reading that many other books anymore.

Alison Stewart (8:24)

For our final days of Classics Weeks, we're discussing the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book is marking it's a hundredth anniversary this year. Our guest is A.O. scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review. We want you to get in on this conversation. When did you first read the Great Gatsby, what were your impressions? How did it make you think about America? Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We have Kit calling in from Bayville. Kit, thank you so much for making the time to call all of it today.

Caller 1 (9:02)

Hi.

Caller 2 (9:02)

Thank you. I could talk about this book for hours, but I'll try and keep it brief. I've taught this to my high school juniors for the past 33 years and it is an amazing book on so many levels. And as your guest said, every time I go through it, I find something new. But the biggest thing that stands out to me is just how magnificent the prosecution is when he is describing the first time that he ever kisses Daisy and talks about how he wants to climb this ladder, but he can only climb it alone and he weds his unutterable vision to her perishable breath. Clearly, I've read it a number of times. That to me just is such amazing, beautiful prose. And my students, by and large, do enjoy the book.

Alison Stewart (9:54)

They do enjoy the book. What do they like about it?

Caller 2 (9:58)

They like the idea of unrequited love because they are 16, 17 year olds who are also going through phases of unrequited love. And so they see kind of Gatsby as almost a hero, somebody who's not willing to give up on this love, even though Daisy has moved on, even though she's married Tom Buchanan, even though their love is doomed from the very start, which they don't know the first time they read the book. But I certainly know that they kind of see him as this romantic figure, whether it be a boy or a girl that they would like to emulate.

Alison Stewart (10:37)

Thank you so much for calling. Let's talk to Aaron in Pound Ridge, New York. Hi, Erin, you are on the air.

Caller 1 (10:44)

Hi.

Caller 3 (10:44)

I just want to say this book has such meaning for me because when I was dating my current husband, he actually read the book out loud to me. And it was just a very special sort of magical time in our relationship.

Caller 2 (10:59)

Which it still is.

Caller 3 (11:00)

We're happily in love. We've been together for 14 years and have three children. But this is sort of a kickoff to our relationship. And I think it was the only time I've been read out loud to as an adult. So it was very meaningful for us.

Alison Stewart (11:15)

Aaron, thank you so much for sharing that story. This is an interesting.

A.O. Scott (11:17)

What a great story.

Alison Stewart (11:18)

It is a great story. This is interesting. Tony, this text says if Fitzgerald were alive now, he might just swap out jazz clubs for yacht parties in Miami and Gatsby's yellow car for a matte black Lamborghini. And the story would feel eerily familiar. What do you make of that?

A.O. Scott (11:40)

Well, I think there's something to that. I mean, I think that what he sort of the atmosphere of the story, the world, the America that he depicts that is kind of besotted with wealth and a certain kind of hedonism. He throws these big parties and you know, even though he himself doesn't drink and doesn't party very hard, he does them partly just to impress Daisy and because he's playing the part of, of a rich man and trying to buy his way into the high society that she belongs to. In spite of his questionable background, he's a former bootlegger and makes common cause with gangsters, with the guy who fixed the World Series in 1919. So the way that he's sort of on both sides of the law, he's ambiguous. The mystique around him is something that I think you see in a lot of popular culture now. I mean, I think that it's, it's, it's not an accident that that, you know, a lot of, of hip hop artists have, have taken up Gatsby as a kind of avatar or that that when Baz Luhrmann made the film version in 2013 starring Leo DiCaprio and, and, and Carey Mulligan, it was. Jay Z was the executive producer of the soundtrack. And what really made that movie for me most authentic in a way as a representation of what Gatsby could be now was that what was the presence of that kind of hip hop inflected soundtrack. So I think that a lot of what Fitzgerald saw in terms of the growth of popular culture and of a kind of a money culture and the, the fading away of older sort of social structures based on more rigid class hierarchies is something that we're still in the stream of, we're still living in. And the book, one thing I would say, you know, to the, to the, in response to some of, and to elaborate what the last two callers have said is the book stays very contemporary. I mean, it is a book of its time. And you can sort of go back and think about the 20s and you know, and the sort of the, the big cars and people listening to the radio and doing the things that they in that. But it is a book that feels very, very present, very current. When you're reading it, you don't think, oh, I'm reading about something that happened 100 or more years ago. You feel like I'm reading about the world that. That is around me now. And I think many of the books that last have that. But I think this in particular, in a way, the beginnings of what we think of as modern American culture were what Fitzgerald was observing in the early 1920s.

Alison Stewart (14:38)

This is an interesting question. This text came in. It says, how come no one ever talks about how there are no redeeming characters in Gatsby?

A.O. Scott (14:50)

Well, it's. I mean, some people have. You know, there have been. There are readings of the book that see it as very kind of brutally satirical. You know, that it's representing a world of just. Of corruption kind of from end to end, that every single person in the book, Jay Gatsby included, is morally reprehensible or corrupt in some way. And the book is very. I mean, it's very interesting at the beginning of the book. It's narrated by Nick Carraway. Yeah, by Nick Carraway, who is sort of a neighbor of Gatsby's, who's a very marginal character in the book, but it's from his point of view. And he basically talks about his own cynicism and his own contempt for just about everybody he's ever met in his life except for Jay Gatsby. And he kind of goes to great length even as he is showing all of these aspects of Gatsby's character that would seem to be a. Unsavory in different ways. You know, his. His dishonesty, his criminality, his immaturity, his. The sort of naive aspect of his. Of his love for. For. For Daisy. But Nick insists nonetheless that this is. This. This. This is. This was a man of. Of kind of. Of noble and heroic character who met a tragic end. And the reader believes it. I. I think that you sort of often, rightly or wrongly kind of go along with that conception of the character, whether, you know, stepping back and looking at what the story is saying objectively, whether you believe it or not, you sort of feel it. But it's one of the things that I think makes the book so interesting. And so, I mean, the previous caller's students may go back to it in 10 years thinking, oh, this was the great love story that I read when I was 16 years old and say, wait, wait a minute. What is this? This is. You know, these people are horrible.

Alison Stewart (17:00)

What did you think when you read the Great Gatsby? We'd like to invite you into this conversation. What were your impressions? How has your understanding of the book changed over time? Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We'll continue with our guest, A.O. scott as we discuss the Great Gatsby at 100. You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. For the final days of our Classics Week, we are discussing the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby with A.O. scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review. The book has many male characters, Tony, but there's Daisy Buchanan. You've got Jordan Baker as well. What do you think of these two female characters? Where do they play in the narrative?

A.O. Scott (18:02)

Well, Jordan is kind of the sort of love interest, if you could call it, I don't know if you could call it love, but the sort of the romantic foil for Nick Carraway. And she is, I think, meant to represent a certain kind of 1920s woman, very modern. I mean, this is the decade in which women got the vote, in which there was sort of a lot of talk of the new woman. There was sort of the idea of the flapper who was a kind of independent, sexually liberated, non traditional modern woman. And Jordan Baker kind of is that she's very cynical, somewhat kind of transactional in her relationships, but also an astute observer of what's going on. And I think her cynicism is partly that. And then Daisy is really a fascinating character because Daisy is of course, the object of Gatsby's great lifelong love and is married to Tom Buchanan, who is surely one of the most repellent people. I don't know in any, in any book that I can think of, just a bully, a racist, a philanderer, a kind of know it all blowhard, the worst kind of mansplainer. I mean, just, just a very unpleasant. Even the scenes that he's in, you want, you know, you want to just like get away from him and you spend all this, all this time with him. Nonetheless, Daisy is married to him and, spoiler alert, stays with him and has sort of made a choice that much as she still may have feelings for Jay and have a view of their past love that's similar to his, she's making a different choice, which can also be seen as a sort of a modern cynical choice, but also as a way of being realistic and practical about her own prospects in the world. So she's quite a complex and I think, interesting character. And Fitzgerald generally, I mean, it's true in his short stories. It's certainly true in Tender Is the Night he was a pretty good portraitist, a sympathetic portraitist of. Of women in different circumstances.

Caller 4 (20:48)

We got this interesting text from David and Catskill. It says, I was forced to read this in high school and I hated it. Our society is so inundated with these tales of white hetero prosperity that I don't think we need to burden our young people with them any longer. Let the bipoc and queer voices be heard for the next 100 years.

Alison Stewart (21:09)

And I thought about it.

Caller 4 (21:09)

You know, there recently was a book written about Gatsby from the point of view of Jordan Baker as an Asian woman. The Chosen and the Beautiful. Have you heard any reimaginings or retellings of the book that you have found to answer David's question or to take it even farther?

A.O. Scott (21:30)

Yes, there is that one. And there's also a really fascinating kind of idea that comes up in the scholarship and the popular culture which takes Gatsby's story as a. As. As a passing novel. I mean, there are some ideas that. There is. That there is some internal evidence that may suggest that. That. That Gatsby himself is. Is. Is. Is a black man who has. Who has passed into the. Into the white world. The. The. There are some tantalizing hints to that effect in. In. In the book itself. And, and there is, you know, some of it filtered through Tom Buchanan's obsession with. With race and his, you know, questioning of Gatsby's origins. And, you know, he famously calls Gatsby Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And, and he's obsessed with. With. With racial purity and the idea that. That, you know, that. That white women will be. Be violated by. By men of color. And seems to imagine Jay as a case of that. And, you know, in the mid-20s are a time when the passing novel, including Nell Larson's passing, is a sort of a literary sub genre almost. Gene Toomer. So, yeah, Gene Toomer, Jesse Rodman Fassett, also Faulkner's Light in August. I mean, there's. It's. There's a lot in this, so to say that this book is just. Yes, it is about. Certainly on its surface it's about wealthy heterosexual white people, undeniably, but it's also about a lot of other things that are happening in American society at that time and since. And it is, I think, a book that has interesting racial subtexts and also raises questions of identity that are still central in American life. Whether identity is something that you make, that you acquire, that is something that you choose in a way, or whether it's something that kind of defines you. And Jay Gatsby, whoever he is and wherever he's from, is very much in that, in the crux of that question, and lives in a world where that kind of question is central. And I think that that is, you know, that's still the America that we live in. So I think that there are always ways with books that are worth reading, are always saying more than they seem to be saying and can be used. So you could, I think, and there are teachers who have, I know, taught this in a way that brings out the multiplicity and complexity of American life that is embedded in this book. Which isn't to say that there aren't many other books that can be read alongside it. And it's not the only book, certainly, that anyone should read.

Alison Stewart (24:48)

Let's take a couple of calls. This is Elijah calling in from Bayonne. Hi, Elijah. Thank you so much for joining us on all of it. You're on the air, Elijah. All right. We're going to go to Jeffrey in Westchester. Jeffrey, are you there?

Caller 5 (25:03)

I certainly am.

Alison Stewart (25:05)

Would love to hear what you have to say.

Caller 2 (25:07)

Well, I read the Gatsby in high.

Caller 5 (25:09)

School, and then a few years later, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. And while I was there, decades ago, there was a revolution and a lot of changes in the society with the diffusion of electricity, opening up of cable, telephones, and the social hierarchy, which was very rigid under the previous king, had broken down. And the influx of wealth and the redistribution of wealth caused a lot of social changes that at the time I was very unprepared to understand or explain.

Caller 2 (25:40)

But I hearkened back to the lessons.

Caller 5 (25:41)

Of the Gatsby and what I thought I was seeing and what I still believe, having come back to school and studied this extensively, was the advent of this social phenomena where the influx of wealth and the softening of the social hierarchy allowed for things like their version of the flapper girl, their version of the Gatsby to emerge within society as players, whereas before they never had. And the way that they behaved reminded me extensively of what the nouveau riche in Great Gatsby did.

Alison Stewart (26:14)

Thank you so much for the call. Let's talk to Larry.

A.O. Scott (26:16)

That's amazing. That's fascinating. I think that's a really, you know, a really interesting insight into, into Nepal, but also in a way that that this to the way that that this novel is capturing something that that that can happen, you know, very far from, you know, from Long island in the 1920s.

Alison Stewart (26:37)

Let's talk to Bernadette, who's calling in from Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Bernadette, thank you for taking the time to call. All of it.

Caller 1 (26:45)

Thank you for taking my call. I love this discussion. I actually read the Great Gatsby for the classic for the summer book club, and I may have read it when I was younger, but I really didn't remember much about it. And the thing that struck me about it is the plotting that how tightly woven the story is and how by the time it ends, all of the different pieces come together. I think it's just seamlessly put together. There's so much in it. The relationships, you know, the murder, all the other commentaries, social commentaries. I think it's a flawless book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Plus, the prose is just remarkable.

Alison Stewart (27:35)

Bernadette, thank you so much for calling in as we get ready to finish out this segment. Why should the book still be read 100 years from now, Tony, or do you think it should be read 100 years from now?

A.O. Scott (27:49)

Oh, I think it will. I mean, if anyone's read. Who knows? I mean, it's very hard to predict the future of anything. But if people are reading books in 100 years, which I think, you know, I think some people probably will, I mean, I do think that it's likely that, you know, some of the themes and some of the issues will still be relevant in some form. And, you know, the thing about great books is that they last beyond their moment. So, you know, Fitzgerald may have thought and may have intended to write something about his society at that time and to sort of look around him and see what, you know, the types of people he saw and what they were doing and put down a story that kind of explained and illuminated them. But. But as long as there are questions of identity, of social belonging, as long as people are thinking about status, as long as people are falling in love and wondering what they should or can or would do for love, this story will still have something to say. I mean, just what we've heard from all of the different callers and people who have texted in. It's a book that resonates in all kinds of different ways. And I can't predict the ways that it will resonate 100 years from now, but I suspect that it will. I suspect that people having the conversation that you and I are having now on its 200th birthday, will still find a lot to talk about and still will find readers who appreciate and value it.

Alison Stewart (29:30)

My guest has been A.O. scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review. We've been discussing the Great Gatsby Tony, it's nice talking to you.

A.O. Scott (29:40)

It's a great pleasure. Thank you.

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