100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby’

Summary

The Daily: 100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby’

Episode Release Date: July 25, 2025
Host: Michael Barbaro
Guest: A.O. Scott, Times Critic at Large

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Introduction

In this centennial episode of The Daily, host Michael Barbaro engages in an insightful conversation with A.O. Scott, the New York Times Critic at Large, to explore the enduring legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. They delve into how this once-overlooked novel has solidified its place as the quintessential American novel, examining its themes, character complexities, and cultural significance over the past century.

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Initial Reception of The Great Gatsby

When The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, it failed to garner significant acclaim. Critics were largely unimpressed by its romantic narrative, with some dismissing it as "an amusing book for one season only" (07:17). Fitzgerald himself never fully recovered from this initial setback, and both he and the novel faded into obscurity following his death in 1940.

A.O. Scott: "The reviews are, at best, tepid, sometimes some of them quite hostile" (07:17).

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The Rebirth and Rediscovery

The novel's resurgence began during World War II when over 100,000 copies were distributed to American soldiers as part of the Armed Forces Editions. This government endorsement played a pivotal role in rekindling interest in the book. Additionally, the post-war era saw a concerted effort within academia and journalism to define an American canon, where The Great Gatsby was rediscovered and celebrated as a key literary work. This period also coincided with the expansion of higher education, making literature more accessible to a broader audience.

A.O. Scott: "Critics began to rediscover the Great Gatsby… it has become part of the great middlebrow of the post-war decades" (09:29).

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The Great American Novel Debate

A.O. Scott posits that The Great Gatsby epitomizes the Great American Novel, serving as a mirror reflecting the American psyche. The novel's elusiveness and its ability to provoke continuous interpretation contribute to its lasting relevance. Scott emphasizes that the book operates on multiple levels, allowing readers to project their own experiences and understandings onto its narrative.

A.O. Scott: "It's like a mirror or a Rorschach blot… something in this book that continues to be resonant with an idea that we have about America" (04:21).

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Character Analysis: Gatsby vs. Tom Buchanan

Central to the novel are the contrasting characters of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, who represent divergent facets of American society. Gatsby embodies the self-made man, striving to reinvent himself and attain the American Dream, albeit through dubious means. In contrast, Tom represents old money, entitlement, and the rigid social hierarchies that exclude outsiders like Gatsby.

Michael Barbaro: "Is President Trump Gatsby or Tom?" (25:00)

A.O. Scott: "With Trump, is this old money or new money? What elite does he or doesn't he belong to?" (27:00)

This dynamic explores themes of ambition, identity, and the inherent conflicts within the American social structure.

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Modern Relevance and Cultural Impact

The Great Gatsby has permeated American popular culture, inspiring numerous film adaptations and references in television and music. From the 1949 adaptation, criticized for its sentimental portrayal, to Baz Luhrmann's extravagant 2013 version featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, each rendition reflects contemporary interpretations of Gatsby's character and the novel's themes.

Scott highlights the novel’s influence on modern narratives, including its resonance with hip-hop culture's emphasis on self-made success and its symbolic presence in shows like Seinfeld and Family Guy.

A.O. Scott: "Jay Z executive produced the soundtrack and in a way brought to the surface an idea that had been there for a while, which is of the interesting resonance between Gatsby and hip hop culture" (15:12)

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Critical Perspectives and Personal Reflections

While The Great Gatsby is widely celebrated, it has its critics. Katherine Schwartz of New York Magazine contends that the novel's characters lack emotional depth and function merely as symbolic archetypes. However, Scott counters that the characters' inscrutability and the novel's lyrical prose create a mystique that invites endless interpretation.

Michael Barbaro: "She thinks the whole thing's kind of flimsy" (29:09)

A.O. Scott: "I find that the characters are much more elusive than that… what casts that spell is the gorgeousness of the writing and a sense of the mysteriousness and the strangeness of the people" (29:12)

Barbaro shares a personal connection to the novel, relating it to his own journey of social mobility and the pervasive sense of fraudulence that mirrors Gatsby's own struggles.

Michael Barbaro: "It's the story of being the child of a firefighter who didn't go to college... reconciling where you come from and who you are" (31:35)

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Concluding Thoughts

The conversation culminates in a profound discussion about the novel's portrayal of America as a land of both boundless potential and inherent tragedy. Fitzgerald's depiction suggests that the American project is fundamentally flawed, built on a foundation of inequity and division, yet perpetually striving towards an ideal that remains elusive.

A.O. Scott: "Fitzgerald recognizes that they're the same moment. We're at this same kind of impossible crux" (40:16)

Both Barbaro and Scott acknowledge that The Great Gatsby continues to serve as a critical lens through which to examine American identity, ambition, and the enduring quest for meaning.

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Notable Quotes with Attribution and Timestamps

• A.O. Scott (07:17): "The reviews are, at best, tepid, sometimes some of them quite hostile."
• A.O. Scott (04:21): "It's like a mirror or a Rorschach blot… something in this book that continues to be resonant with an idea that we have about America."
• A.O. Scott (09:29): "Critics began to rediscover the Great Gatsby… it has become part of the great middlebrow of the post-war decades."
• Michael Barbaro (25:00): "Is President Trump Gatsby or Tom?"
• A.O. Scott (15:12): "Jay Z executive produced the soundtrack and in a way brought to the surface an idea that had been there for a while, which is of the interesting resonance between Gatsby and hip hop culture."
• Michael Barbaro (29:09): "She thinks the whole thing's kind of flimsy."
• A.O. Scott (29:12): "I find that the characters are much more elusive than that… what casts that spell is the gorgeousness of the writing and a sense of the mysteriousness and the strangeness of the people."
• Michael Barbaro (31:35): "It's the story of being the child of a firefighter who didn't go to college... reconciling where you come from and who you are."
• A.O. Scott (40:16): "Fitzgerald recognizes that they're the same moment. We're at this same kind of impossible crux."

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Timestamps Reference

• 07:17
• 04:21
• 09:29
• 25:00
• 15:12
• 29:09
• 29:12
• 31:35
• 40:16

---

Note: Times in brackets refer to the corresponding timestamps in the original transcript.

Transcript

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[Michael Balvaro]

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Balvaro. This is the Daily this year, the Great Gatsby turns 100. Today, Times critic at large A.O. scott tells us the story of how an overlooked book by a 28 year old author eventually became the great American novel. And explores why all these decades later, we still see ourselves in its pages. It's Friday, July 25th. Hey there.

[A.O. Scott]

And here he is.

[Michael Balvaro]

Good afternoon.

[A.O. Scott]

Great to see you.

[Michael Balvaro]

Nice to see you.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah.

[Michael Balvaro]

Should we get started?

[A.O. Scott]

Let's do it.

[Michael Balvaro]

Well, Tony, welcome to the first ever daily book club. A book club for the two of us.

[A.O. Scott]

That's right.

[Michael Balvaro]

I brought my copy.

[A.O. Scott]

It's beautiful.

[Michael Balvaro]

Yeah. I do want to show it to you.

[A.O. Scott]

Oh, it's gorgeous.

[Michael Balvaro]

It's actually got real texture to it.

[A.O. Scott]

Oh yeah. It's like it's embossed.

[Michael Balvaro]

It's foil on matte paper.

[A.O. Scott]

Wow.

[Michael Balvaro]

And it's treasured.

[A.O. Scott]

That's nice. Well, I have been through. This is maybe my fifth.

[Tony]

Yeah.

[Michael Balvaro]

Tell me about yours.

[A.O. Scott]

Fifth or sixth copy. Cause I've just, I've worn through some. And then it's always a book that I know I have a copy of and can't find in the chaos of my life and my books. So I buy another one.

[Michael Balvaro]

Can I just look at the COVID art?

[A.O. Scott]

Sure. There's a flapper on the COVID There's a flapper on the COVID And it's got some short stories in there to sort of to pad it out.

[Michael Balvaro]

Cause it's a short book.

[A.O. Scott]

It's a short book as we will talk about. Yeah.

[Michael Balvaro]

So a big reason why we're having this conversation is because this book plays a really big role in my life. I don't know how many people have this kind of relationship with the book. But the Great Gatsby is the book that I go back to time and time again. Not just to read it over and over again, which I have done, but sometimes just to pick it up, open it up and just kind of pour myself back into it and feel all the feelings and, you know, it does something for me and to me, which I'm hoping this conversation will unlock, why it has such a hold on my imagination. But that is not the only reason we're having this conversation, so that this is not entirely about me. We are having this conversation, you and I, because this book is celebrating its centennial. And I want to talk with you about what it's become over the past hundred years. Because it's become something.

[A.O. Scott]

Oh, yes, it's become a lot of things.

[Michael Balvaro]

And I want to talk about what it has become.

[A.O. Scott]

In your estimation, if you had to pick just a single American book that somehow had a representative status, that somehow, if you asked 100 people, not even Great American Novel, but American Novel, the answer would come back somehow, in most cases, I would wager, the Great Gatsby. And so it's a book that is one of these kind of. I don't know if you call it a mirror or a Rorschach blot. There's just something in this book that continues to be resonant with an idea that we have about America as Americans, and I think also as people looking in from the outside who say, like, what's going on over there? Maybe reading this book would help us figure it out.

[Michael Balvaro]

It says something really uniquely American about the American psyche.

[A.O. Scott]

Yes. What it says is a little more complicated. Right. And one of the things about the book that I think partly accounts for this sort of staying power and this fascination and this hold that it has is that even though it's a slender book written by a pretty young novelist, it. There's an elusiveness that it has, so that you're always kind of chasing after its meaning and maybe never quite catching up to it. But that keeps it alive, keeps it in play, keeps it something that individual readers often come back to, but that also the collective readership in and out of schools and college classrooms and wherever else and movie theaters keeps coming back to.

[Michael Balvaro]

So let's actually tell the story of this book. You've started to do this, but perhaps we can do it a little more formally how it came to say so much, even if it's not always clear exactly what it's saying.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's third book, and he was already a literary celebrity. He was already kind of one of the voices of his generation and commercially and critically successful. And in this book, he tells the story through this narrator, Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner, graduated From Yale and is selling bonds in New York and living out on Long Island In West Egg. There are two eggs. East Egg and West Egg. And West Egg is the kind of new money side. And he has a neighbor who you don't see for a while who's kind of. It's like a movie technique of you keep this person off camera for a while so you just hear the name Gatsby. Gatsby. Gatsby. Mm. Jay Gatsby. Very wealthy, lives in this huge mansion, throws epic parties every weekend in the summer, there's a big party at Gatsby's house.

[Michael Balvaro]

Yeah, I mean, and when we.

[A.O. Scott]

We mean that. One of the great details that Fitzgerald uses, he says every Friday these trucks would come in full of oranges and lemons by the hundreds. And every Monday, the garbage collectors would come and take away the squeezed out rinds of those oranges and lemons. So that's just sort of a little piece, if you imagine the cocktails required. Right. The cocktails required to consume a thousand pieces of citrus in the course of a weekend. And it turns out that Jay Gatsby has been in love with. Has been carrying a torch for Daisy Buchanan. Back before the war, they knew each other, and he has been ardently longing for her. All this time he was away overseas, he's come back, he's made a fortune, and he's built a whole life and a whole identity as this wealthy fixture of West Egg in order to somehow win her back. Everything that he's doing, this elaborate, extravagant display, this whole identity he's built for himself is for that one single romantic purpose. But when the book was published, people weren't buying that romance critics certainly weren't.

[Michael Balvaro]

What year is this?

[A.O. Scott]

This is 1925. And the reviews are, at best, tepid, sometimes some of them quite hostile. And one of them saying that the book has any kind of future. One of the critics said, this is a book, an amusing book for one season only. So this is gonna be sort of what everyone's gonna be reading maybe at the beach, if they read books at the beach in those days.

[Michael Balvaro]

Yeah, Even that turned out to be overly optimistic.

[A.O. Scott]

Right, right, right. So it was a bust. And it was kind of a pretty big reversal of fortune for Fitzgerald, who never quite recovered from it. He did keep writing. He wrote Tender is the Night, which I think is a fantastic. I mean, that's my favorite of his novels. We can do another episode on that one someday, but I don't think so. Okay, but then, you know, the story is sort of the well known tragic story of F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know, going out to Hollywood, falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism. By the time of his death, you know, in 1940, was pretty well forgotten. And so was Gatsby. And it had faded into kind of obscurity.

[Michael Balvaro]

And what is its path? I guess back is the wrong word. What is its story of rebirth?

[A.O. Scott]

It's rebirth.

[Michael Balvaro]

Yeah.

[A.O. Scott]

This is fascinating to me because I'm always interested in, and always have been interested in this phenomenon of books that are forgotten or misunderstood and then kind of come back. In the case of the Great Gatsby, a few things happened, one of which was that during the Second World War, there were these armed forces editions of various books that were given out with rations. You know, if you're a GI going overseas, you would get a carton of cigarettes and, you know, a pack of condoms and a copy of a paperback copy of the Great Gatsby. And I think more than 100,000 of these were printed.

[Michael Balvaro]

And so that's a pretty serious government endorsement. Kind of an Oprah book before Oprah.

[A.O. Scott]

It's kind of like that. Yeah.

[Michael Balvaro]

And I'm guessing this had something to do with the fact that this book is small, doesn't take up much space, and it's a reminder of home.

[A.O. Scott]

And I don't know, it'd be fascinating to know who was reading and who was making the selections. But it came back into circulation that way among a wide, and one assumes pretty diverse readership of sort of the American soldiers. And around the same time, and after, there was an effort in the academy, but also elsewhere, also in the world of journalism, to define an American identity and an American canon, sort of that here was a country that had just emerged from a depression and a war. As a great power in the world, we'd save the world for the first time. And so who were we? And what were the books or the other cultural products that would tell us that that would give an account of what we were and what we meant to be and pass it on and pass it on. And so there were a lot of efforts to figure that out and to make cases. And this was when a lot of what we people of later generations, let's say like you and me, grew up as kind of thinking of like, okay, what's American literature? Oh, there's the Scarlet Letter, you know, there's Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, there's Faulkner, there's Hemingway. And critics began to rediscover the Great Gatsby. And so all of these lists, these syllabi were being made in the 1940s by a lot of different critics, but it was a much more widespread cultural phenomenon than that. And partly because at the same time, higher education itself is becoming a mass phenomenon. You have the GI Bill and you have the enormous expansion of higher education, and part of that expansion is the expansion of literature, of reading literature. So more people are, you know, in terms of raw numbers, but also in terms of it feeling like an important thing to do. Reading novels. Reading American novels. Reading great American novels is not exactly mass culture, but not specialized high culture either, is sort of part of what will become to be known as the great middlebrow of the post war decades.

[Michael Balvaro]

So that's basically the story of how this ends up on my high school syllabus. Somebody upon high felt it represented the American canon. And as you just said, it's sufficiently midd to be read by a 16 year old in North Haven, Connecticut.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah, exactly. And also in Providence, Rhode island, where I encountered it. It's not Moby Dick, it's a lot shorter. It's romantic, it's very readable. It's a book that high school students can read, can enjoy, can think about, and it also gives them a lot to think about. And I don't, you know, mean this to sound kind of diminishing, but it's. It's a book that can generate a lot of term papers and a lot of class discussions. It's a very teachable book, which is something certainly Fitzgerald was not thinking about when he was writing it. But it turns out to be part of the key to its later longevity.

[Michael Balvaro]

Right.

[A.O. Scott]

And because so many of us encountered it there as part of our education, it just becomes part of the cultural baggage that we carry around. And since we're talking about American culture, it's been source material for all kinds of adaptations.

[Michael Balvaro]

Dance me, Jay?

[A.O. Scott]

With pleasure. We have a very special orchestra tonight. Excuse us, please, sir. The first film version made in the post war era was made in 1949. Well, who are we to say they should or shouldn't see each other again? She's married.

[Michael Balvaro]

I'm happily married.

[A.O. Scott]

And rewrote the book because the production code that was in effect at the time could not permit most of what happens in the Great Gatsby to happen on screen. So it's really, if you've read the book and you watched that version, at a certain point you'd be like, what? What? What? There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. And it's very sentimental, it's very pious. It's just. It's not a good movie.

[Michael Balvaro]

But I should at this point remind people you were our chief critic for many years.

[A.O. Scott]

I was, yes. I say this with some authority. Excuse me. And then of course, the next big film adaptation, 1974. How do you do, old sport? I'm Gatsby, starring Robert Redford at the very peak of his Redfordness. Of his Redfordness. Why didn't you wait for me? Because rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby. It's a very solemn, melancholy Gatsby, and it plays very much on the sort of the elusiveness and the sadness that surrounds the character. On the other hand, I'm afraid I.

[Michael Balvaro]

Haven'T been a very good host, old sport.

[A.O. Scott]

You see.

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[A.O. Scott]

Fast forward to 2013 and you have Baz Luhrmann's extravagant version with Leo DiCaprio.

[Michael Balvaro]

What is your opinion of me anyhow?

[A.O. Scott]

My opinion?

[Michael Balvaro]

Yes, yes, your opinion.

[A.O. Scott]

Who is sort of the American movie star of that moment. In a similar way, it's not only DiCaprio who sort of is the magnetic center of the Baz Luhrmann adaptation.

[Michael Balvaro]

By the time we reached the bridge, I was impossibly confused.

[A.O. Scott]

Jay Z executive produced the soundtrack and in a way brought to the surface an idea that had been there for a while, which is of the. The interesting resonance between Gatsby and hip hop culture.

[Michael Balvaro]

Right. Like Mark Twain, Jake Gatsby. I pop things. Yellow cars, yellow gold, like slick brick, still tip.

[A.O. Scott]

And if you think about it, one of the tropes of hip hop is the self made. I mean, if you think of Jay Z himself, somebody who rose from being, you know, a gangster, a drug dealer, from the streets into the pinnacle of wealth and influence.

[Michael Balvaro]

Started from the bottom.

[A.O. Scott]

Now we're here. You can also, I think, hear a lot of Gatsby as the lonely man who has everything but love in, you know, a lot of Drake's work from the mid 2010s.

[Michael Balvaro]

Still finding myself, let alone a soulmate. I'm just saying feel like we want in the same. Our relationship changed. Dad already never existed.

[A.O. Scott]

Then there's this sort of undercurrent where it turns up on television. Jay, I don't understand. I thought we were friends. We were going to open up a money losing winery together on Simpson's episode.

[Michael Balvaro]

Yeah, this old sport thing, is this, is this something you're trying out or.

[A.O. Scott]

Is this a keeper on Family Guy episodes? We could be like the Gatsbys. Didn't they always have, like, you know.

[Michael Balvaro]

A bunch of people around?

[A.O. Scott]

And they were. And of course, my own favorite, George Costanza on Seinfeld, a character who, it's pretty safe to say, has read very few, if any books. He has this whole kind of jag across, I think, two different episodes where he's obsessed with this idea of being like the Gatsbys. I wish we could go back to when we were the Gatsbys. I want to get it back to when we were the Gatsbys. I still don't know what that means. And, you know, as anyone who has read the book will know, there are no Gatsbys.

[Michael Balvaro]

There's just one.

[A.O. Scott]

There's just one. And he's not even Gatsby. The book and the character and just the name have entered into American commercial culture, American popular culture. And it keeps going. I mean, we've in a way, only scratched the surface, but it's there. And, you know, from the Second World War on, it's always there. It's always somewhere in lots of different places and, you know, shows no signs, I think, of waning, which is fascinating. It is.

[Michael Balvaro]

And we've been tracing here the arc of this book, how it happened, but I'm not quite sure that we fully explained why. Why, as a. As a piece of literature, it's resonated so deeply what it is about the book, the character, the prose that has made it feel so stunningly American and such an enduring influence. And that is something, Tony, that we're going to talk about when we come back.

[A.O. Scott]

I'm glad I brought my copy.

[Michael Balvaro]

Me too. We're gonna do some participatory reading.

[A.O. Scott]

All right, we'll be right back.

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[Sandra E. Garcia]

Hi, my name is Sandra E. Garcia and I'm a reporter at the New York Times. I write for the Styles Desk where we try to understand our complicated world by keeping up with culture. We want to bring you clarity and let you know why things are trending. Like with my story about knotless braids, I went to different salons in Brooklyn and Manhattan where the style is overbooked. We want to take you to the forefront of cultural shifts so that when you do see the former first lady Michelle Obama wearing her hair differently, you know why. And that's what we do. We add another layer to a moment in culture. Our subscribers make this kind of coverage possible so the New York Times can continue to highlight the stories that go beyond breaking news. Help us keep a pulse on culture by [e-mail] subscribe.

[Michael Balvaro]

So Tony, let's crack open the book and illustrate why this book is seen and has been seen for so long as the great American novel. Where do you want to start? You first?

[A.O. Scott]

Well, I would start at a very granular level. I was just, you know, rereading parts of it before coming to talk to you. And there are so many passages where Fitzgerald's almost sort of going towards something that might be sentimental or cliched and then sort of just twisting back away from it in a kind of lovely and surprising way. When we're first kind of discovering some things about the background about James Gatz and how he became Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the narrator, says 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 17 year old boy would be likely to invent. And to this conception he was faithful to the end. I mean, here we're sort of at another level where we're describing the psychology of the character and the process of making him, which is both very grand, the Platonic conception of himself a son of God. So there's something theological about what James Gatz is doing to make himself into Jay Gatsby. And at the same time there's something juvenile about it. It's a 17 year old boy in North Dakota's idea of what a big shot millionaire would be. And that's who he stayed. That's who he always was, was a sort of kid's idea of this guy. And so the complexity of the character and the complexity of the novel lives in descriptions like that and passages like that where it's working in so many different, almost contradictory directions at once.

[Michael Balvaro]

And you're getting at this. But the great allure of the book is the question of what animates Gatsby, who he really is and what exactly. And this may be somewhat unanswerable. He represents and why that is so American.

[A.O. Scott]

Yes, I think that's exactly right. Because his American ness comes out of this idea of his self inventedness, this idea that here's this kid out in the sticks in North Dakota who's gonna become something else, something better, and who finds his way to that through military service, through criminal activities, through all of these different ways. So there's something very shrewd and scheming about Gatsby and about his progress through the world and also at the same time something very pure and innocent. So he's always still this boy. And this is the key that, that Nick Carraway comes back to again and again in his idea of Gatsby is that there is a purity and integrity and absence of corruption even within a.

[Michael Balvaro]

Character who is profoundly corrupt.

[A.O. Scott]

Who's a criminal. Right. You know, who's in partnership with the guy who fixed the World Series in 1919.

[Michael Balvaro]

Well, that's what I think we need to talk about here. American ambivalence around fraud, criminality and money is really central to this book. And those themes endure absolutely to this very moment.

[A.O. Scott]

They never go away. And nor does the kind of tension and confusion about who belongs and who doesn't belong, who's in and who's out. I think we need to talk about Tom Buchanan. Who is the foil, who's the villain in a way, Daisy's husband. Daisy's husband.

[Michael Balvaro]

A Yale man.

[A.O. Scott]

A Yale man. Old, old, old, old money, not a nice guy. Philanderer, abuser of women. Not only that, just, you know, an ignoramus and an outspoken racist. And in a way, the central triangle in the book is Tom and Gatsby and Daisy. They're both in love with Daisy. Daisy is married to Tom. And the way that he talks about his great epithet for Gatsby is Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. He says, I suppose the thing now is to let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. And so he's upholding a very restrictive, exclusive, pedigreed idea about who's in charge and who's American. And Gatsby's idea is that, well, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere is the person who invents the platonic ideal of himself and creates a self and an identity and a fortune out of nothing or out of whatever ways that he can get to it. And so the interesting kind of doubleness of the book is on the one hand, there's a question of who wins. And to spoil it, the answer is Tom wins Daisy. Even before Gatsby is completely destroyed, Daisy stays with Tom. But then there's also the question of whose side we're on, whose side the book is on, whose side Nick is on. And that answer is Jay.

[Michael Balvaro]

For a long time now, I have been contemplating The Jay Gatsby vs. Tom Buchanan conflict in this political and economic moment that we're in. And let me just put it to you with startling bluntness. Is President Trump Gatsby or Tom? And I'll let you kind of imagine why I've even posed that question. Because it's infused with new money, anti establishmentism, and a motto, make America great Again. That to my mind borrows from whether it means to or not. One of the great lines in Gatsby, which is when Gatsby says to Nick, you can't repeat the past. Of course you can. I mean, what is maga other than a, a pleading to reclaim a past that's so central to this book?

[A.O. Scott]

It's a very interesting question of, I mean, with Trump, is this old money or new money? What elite does he or doesn't he belong to? And certainly his own mythology is that he's been, and I think our colleagues have written a lot about this, about his sense of outsiderness, his sense of the Manhattan elite, the Manhattan establishment, the fancy, know it alls and eggheads, who he was, you know, desperate for a long time to join, who always sort of rebuffed him or Tal went to his parties. Right. But didn't necessarily accept him into their midst. So, you know, in some ways he can be on both sides of the question. I mean, I think from one angle, you look at him and you see the bluster and belligerence and sense of chauvinistic entitlement that aligns him with Tom. On the other hand, you can also see the striving and also for that matter, the kind of dubious relation to sort of norms and laws and conventional ways of doing things that defines Gatsby.

[Michael Balvaro]

And the love of gold.

[A.O. Scott]

Yes. I don't know if.

[Michael Balvaro]

And the dislike of alcohol.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah. But I don't know if there's quite the. I don't quite see the romantic longing. I don't see it. I mean, you don't think of Donald Trump as someone who would sacrifice everything in his life for the love of one woman. Right.

[Michael Balvaro]

It just seems worth Saying that as a country, a country reared on this book, we do seem rather comfortable celebrating and elevating someone with a clear, repeated public history of deceit and convicted criminality.

[A.O. Scott]

So you're saying it's because of Gatsby? I don't think it was invented in Gatsby. But I do think that the idea of self invention in defiance of all rules and norms and a kind of celebration and romanticization of that impulse, that con man impulse, really, I mean. Cause that's one of the things that Gatsby is. Is a big part of American life. American life and American politics and American society. Absolutely.

[Michael Balvaro]

I want to talk for just a moment about the dissenting case here, the literary case against this book. Because I think it's fair to say so far you and I have been rather fond of this book. And I think the best dissenting case that I read was from Katherine Schultz. She wrote it for New York Magazine. She had many complaints about the book. But I'm going to read the central one. She writes, the Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion. Than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable. Though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types walking through the pages of the book. Like kids in a school play who wear sashes, telling the audience what they represent. Old money, the American dream, organized crime. She goes on and on.

[A.O. Scott]

Right.

[Michael Balvaro]

She thinks the whole thing's kind of flimsy.

[A.O. Scott]

See, I would say. I mean, I think that is a brilliant article and sort of must reading. Cause it's sort of the strong case that any Gatsby partisan would have to argue against. But I actually don't find that. I find that the characters are much more elusive than that. Much more watercolor. Than the sort of like the bold neon highlighting that she's. So in some ways, you don't know necessarily what they think or what they feel. There's a certain inscrutability to their motives and to their behaviors. But I think that that is kind of what gives the book some of its mystique and helps it sort of cast a spell. Cause I think if they were just what she's saying, you know, allegorical figures, not people, but just sort of like walking, talking billboards, symbols, billboards, then I don't think that the book would have the kind of staying power that it has. I don't think that it would be. It still might be taught in schools. Those term papers might still be assigned, but I don't think that it would cast a spell in the same way. And I think that what casts that spell is, as we were talking about before, the gorgeousness of the writing and a sense of the mysteriousness and the strangeness of the people.

[Michael Balvaro]

Right, right. And therefore, the thing she points to as a central flaw of the book in your mind is in some ways its chief virtue, that this only partially filled canvas allows us to project whatever we need to, whatever we want to, onto the book and about America and about ourselves.

[A.O. Scott]

That's what I think. And every time I read it, I'm more convinced of this, is that it's kind of an open text in a way. It hasn't entirely. And Fitzgerald hasn't entirely figured out what it wants to say. The great virtue of Fitzgerald is he's not a programmatic thinker. He's not constructing an argument about this. He's kind of feeling his way through it.

[Michael Balvaro]

I think here it's only appropriate that I finally confess what I project onto this book. And for me, the book is about the distance you can travel in your life on a journey of class and social status the entire time, on some level, knowing that you might be a fraud, which is very universally American.

[A.O. Scott]

Right.

[Michael Balvaro]

And for me, it's the story of being the child of a firefighter who didn't go to college. And resonantly for this book, where everyone seems to go to Yale. Somehow getting into Yale, a school that my father only knew as a place where students were so kind of practically unintelligent that they would set fires in fireplaces that had no flu because then he'd have to come put them out. And I got to go there and go on this kind of class defying journey away from my childhood that receded further and further, year by year, and kind of reconciling where you come from and who you are. And. And again, that word fraud hovers over it the whole time, you know.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah.

[Michael Balvaro]

Every time I was in some secret society chamber or at a dinner party in some penthouse apartment in New York City, places I never fathomed I would ever get to in my life, having the question of whether I was passing. Right. And that's in some ways the story of Gatsby. Now, I wasn't in pursuit of some great singular love.

[A.O. Scott]

Right.

[Michael Balvaro]

Mine was a, you know, more amorphous ambition. But Gat's like I was striving and still strive.

[A.O. Scott]

And you use the word striving and also the word passing, which I think is a crucial Part of what this book is about. I mean, in the 1920s, passing meant in many of those cases, across racial lines in which people who were, by the sort of the racial conventions of the time, black crossed over and passed as white. Gatsby is that too? Not in an explicitly racial sense, but it is about coming from one side of a boundary that's a very real but also invisible boundary and going over to the other side of it and what that looks like and how that might feel. What's fascinating to me about the book and what I identify with, this is an interesting kind of contrast is I think a lot about the narrator, Nick Carraway. Here are these two men who can't give an account of themselves.

[Michael Balvaro]

A reliable one.

[A.O. Scott]

A reliable one, right. Who will either give, in the case of Thomas, sort of a dumb and vulgar one, or in the case of Jay, a very sort of romantic and self mythologizing one. And it sort of falls to Nick, well, to figure out what this story is and who these guys are. And the question that I have always about the book is that does he succeed? You know, does he figure it out? Is the narrator reliable or is he implicated in the story in ways that he can't quite take account of?

[Michael Balvaro]

I mean, another way of asking that question is, are you. Are any narrators capable of. Of meeting the task?

[A.O. Scott]

Right. And the question about America in a way to bring it back to that level, is it even interpretable? Can we even make sense of it Here we have, you know, laid out before us a novel that many people over the years, teachers and students and filmmakers and everyone else, have taken as the book that will help us explain to ourselves who we are? And the thing that haunts me about this book right now is that it raises the question, is that even. Are the answers that we're looking for even intelligible? Even there?

[Michael Balvaro]

I mean, you have perfectly teed up. The last thing I want to quote from Gatsby, which is at the end of chapter six. And it's a question of America. I think you're the critic. Fitzgerald describes the moment where Gatsby first kisses Daisy. It's a long passage. I won't bore you with all of it. But when he kisses her, she blossoms for him. Fitzgerald writes like a flower and the incarnation was complete. But then there's this passage that I have spent years trying to understand. And the only thing I'm certain of is that it's about America. Nick Carraway, the narrator, writes that as Gatsby's recounting, falling in love with and kissing Daisy for the first time before he sets upon this extraordinary effort to win her back. Even through his appalling sentimentality, Nick writes, I was reminded of something, an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment, a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound. And what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. End quote. I have always imagined that the elusive rhythm, or the fragment of lost words that he can never communicate is something from some American anthem. Is it America the Beautiful? Is it our Constitution? Is it our declaration of advice? It feels like it's something that tells you what America really is. And Gatsby's entire journey, his ultimately fruitless, tragic effort to reclaim the love he once knew. This overpowering nostalgia that's not fulfilled brings forth in our narrator this effort to grasp something American that's now lost.

[A.O. Scott]

Well, and I think that. That.

[Michael Balvaro]

What is it?

[A.O. Scott]

Well, that passage is exactly echoed at the very end of the book. Cause, you know, if you think about it in terms of breath, Right. There's a more famous passage where he talks about the Dutch sailors coming, you know, seeing this land, Long island, for the first time. And he says its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house. So he's imagining something that isn't there anymore. The forests that were at the edge of the continent that have been cleared to build these houses had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment, man must have held his breath. There's the breath again. In the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired. Face to face for the last time in history, for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And that's also an image of America there, but in America as something that is, like, always lost, always gone. And I think that that's exact. That's an echo of the passage that you just read.

[Michael Balvaro]

So what's going on here? Is the American project fundamentally tragic. It ends up being built on war, slavery, inequity, division. And maybe our best moment is this transitory moment way in the past when the explorers discover America and all this possibility exists. But the minute we actually start to make the thing is when we start to ruin it.

[A.O. Scott]

Yeah. And that has been part of the American story and part of the American myth. I mean, it's one of the myths of the frontier that it's always being pushed back, right? This boundary, the new possibility that's always tantalizingly ahead of us. But I think what Fitzgerald is saying in a way is that it was doomed from the start. That from the very first moment, all of that tragic history, all of that tragic future was written.

[Michael Balvaro]

Right? And the moments right before he kisses Daisy are the greatest potential moments of his life. The minute he kisses her, her, quote, perishable breath becomes real and it all goes downhill right from there.

[A.O. Scott]

And those moments are the same moment in a way, the sailors looking at the green breast of America and Gatsby leaning in for this great kiss. And this is the sort of the genius of the novel and why it's both the story of this guy and the story of this nation is that Fitzgerald recognizes that they're the same moment. We're at this same kind of impossible crux.

[Michael Balvaro]

Well, Tony, this has been a real treat, old sport.

[A.O. Scott]

It's been a pleasure.

[Michael Balvaro]

We'll be right back.

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[Michael Sullivan]

Hi, it's Michael Sullivan from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times. And today we're in the kitchen testing canned tomatoes. We're tasting form, sweetness, acidity, definitely the color, the texture. These tomatoes, they're pretty velvety, like they break apart easily with a spoon. The guides that we write are living, breathing things. It's a piece of fruit in a can, so it's going to change every year. At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't. For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come Visit [e-mail] Wirecutter.

[Michael Balvaro]

Here'S what else you need to know today. In a major announcement on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that France would recognize Palestine as a state, making it the first member of the group of seven industrialized nations to do so. French officials believe that recognizing Palestine as a state now is necessary to give it equal status to Israel as the two sides negotiate the end of their deadly conflict in Gaza, but the decision puts France at odds with the United States.

[A.O. Scott]

And making his first appearance in this arena, ladies and gentlemen, Hul Hogan. Look at that.

[Michael Balvaro]

Look at that. £320 of him. Here we go. Hulk Hogan, whose flamboyance, star power and bulging biceps helped transform professional wrestling from a low budget regional attraction into a multi billion dollar industry, has died at the age of 71.

[Tony]

You something maniacs. Hulk Hogan here, the greatest of all time with the largest arms in the world, brother.

[Michael Balvaro]

Even after retiring from professional wrestling, Hogan's cultural impact remained enormous. Last year, shortly after President Trump survived an assassination attempt, Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention, tearing off his shirt to reveal a Trump Vance shirt underneath it.

[Tony]

As an entertainer, I tried to stay out of politics. But after everything that's happened to our country over the past four years and everything that happened last weekend, I can no longer stay silent. I'm here tonight because I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero.

[Michael Balvaro]

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zypko. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Elisheba Itube, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonder. Special thanks to my 9th grade English teacher Bill Hunter for introducing me to the Great Gatsby as only he could. That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Balboro. See you on Monday.

[A.O. Scott]

Foreign.

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