Why is this considered a classic, please? I've just read it and can appreciate the writing but am a bit meh about it.

I read it recently. I think it's all about the American dream - the way that Gatsby is such a shadowy and insubstantial character and it is his riches he uses to impress Daisy with, not his humanity - which we never find out much about. I think it's interesting because of how invested Nick is in Gatsby being a good guy - he needs him to be noble and an example of someone working hard, getting rich and getting the girl because as someone much poorer and less sucessful the idea of mobility is really important to him. Nick's attachment to the outcome of the story also makes him a very unreliable peripheral narrator - a bit like Watson, and that's nicely slippery too.

I don't see Nick as being poorer, Jenn. His cousin is Daisy, after all, who is all old money whereas Jay Gatsby is a self-invented nouveau riche kinda guy with no taste.

I mean I did like the book and there is some fantastic writing as I said. But would be interested to know if critics are in unison about it being a great novel?

And what *is* a great novel anyway?

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Sorry, I mean he is financially poorer but much better regarded in society because of his background.

I think it's a classic because it's short... It's rather like L'Eétranger (OK, couldn't get a capital E with an acute accent on it, so here are two different Es instead...) in the sense that it leaves so much unsaid and yet is so perfectly contextualised that the reader can fill in the gaps without having to struggle over it.

It kind of grows in the mind after you've read it - you think of Gatsby's mansion, his glancing into rooms, the same way you think of Mersault's flat & M trying to find the salt smell of Marie's hair in the pillow after she's left.

Or, more pompously, It Exemplifies the Emptiness of the American Dream, blah blah blah.

I've often thought that books get that "classic" tag because they capture the mood or spirit of the times so vividly. "On The Road" for example, rode the crest of the breaking rock n roll wave in 1956,( although it was written ten years previous) and was thus held up as a mirror for the era. See also To Kill A Mocking Bird, The Great Gatsby etc etc.

It's a very long time since I've read it. There are probably a number of critical assessments online that will discuss it.

I'm on shaky ground here, because it's over 30 years since I read The Great Gatsby and I incurred Jem's wrath recently for commenting on a film I hadn't actually seen but . . . if I recall, what I liked about it at the time (and I've no idea if I'd like the book now) was it had a specific feel about it that was more than the sum of its parts. And within that was the occasional piece of description that has a transcendent quality to it; by which I mean it captures perfectly some aspect of human nature but more by suggestion than straight telling. I think it's similar with J D Salinger. I can understand why someone would fail to be impressed with a lot of his writing, especially given the hype that's built around it over the years. But for me he had the same gift, of using the minimum of words to suggest the maximum of feeling. A great example of that I think is his short story, 'For Esme, with Love and Squalor' which I recall as utterly heartbreaking, but all through suggestion - so reading it, you get that fantastic feeling of 'Oh, I know just what he means . . . '

Yes, Terry - he is very subtle in the way he describes snobbery and how Gatsby doesn't see it yet we the reader do and this is not spelled out by Nick, the narrator. But I agree about the hype of any book or film. It invariably puts you off. I've stopped reading film reviews now before seeing a film for that very reason.

I agree with everyone who's said that it's what is somehow in the spaces between the words, as much as those words (except of course that it's the words which create those spaces).

At the simple level, there's the rather louche glamour of that period, that place (Chandler has it, on the other coast). I haven't read it for years and years, though I remember being knocked out by it when I did, but I still remember that scene where Nick is lunching with Daisy and the other woman whose name I can't even remember, and the heat and the great, billowing white muslin curtains...

And a tragedy, which can't be a tragedy, because no one's a hero.

And the more you look at it the more subtle it is - Nick as a semi-unreliable narrator of someone who's deeply unreliable, the different patterns of insider/outsider (Nick) and outsider/insider (Gatsby), tragic irony in why Gatsby's killed... Robert Redford such terrible casting - should have been someone much more double-edgedly glamorous.

"But I agree about the hype of any book or film. It invariably puts you off."

For me a there's a huge difference between a film or book which is hyped by the publicists and marketeers - which is more to do with budgets and clever catching of the zeitgeist, than with whether it's any good or not for the long-term - and one which has earned its place on the Penguin Classics list and the Film School syllabuses.

A book/film which generations and generations of readers have gone on finding fascinating and protean, evoking its time but also speaking to ours, must have something to it. You may not get it, or you may get it but not like it (as with the thread about Tristram Shandy). But that's quite different from saying it doesn't deserve its status.

But I never read reviews before I go and see something, unless I'm definitely not planning to see it and I'm just curious in a general way as to what this talked-about film is all about.

I'm not saying it doesn't deserve its status if it's generally agreed by readers and critics alike to be good but it still puts me off in that I think it ought to be better than it is. Or even better than it is, is perhaps what I mean. But I don't think it's that different with films, really. Film has been around long enough now for there to be a canon.

On a bit of a tangent . . . we went to see Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' last week. I haven't enjoyed a film so much in ages. It's not as funny as his earlier stuff, of course, but then it isn't really aiming to be. There's a lot of warmth in it and just plain fun; like the main character meeting the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway (who is very funny, actually) and loads of others, all no doubt just happening to be Woody Allen's heroes. My partner really liked it, too, and she's never been into Woody Allen.

Terry

I really liked it too, Terry but I didn't read the review first! I went to see Tyrannasaur last night and was bowled over! (On another tangent!)

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However to get back to The Great Gatsby - both Emma and Jenn are saying that Nick is an unreliable narrator but I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion. It seems to me he is a detached maybe overly-tolerant observer but a truthful one.

Well I've read it at least 20 times. It's my favourite book ever. I love it because of the spaces in between the words. He just describes what happens; he does so very lyrically and yet incredibly economically, and we are free to respond, undirected by the writer as to how we ought to feel or think. You can love the book and have directly opposing views on it from someone else who loves the book. Some love it for its glamorous portrayal of the super rich. I love it because it shows what toads they are. I love how honestly he depicts the brutish immorality of Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald was starstruck by the wealthy but, like Waugh, he still draws a true likeness of them.

It has in its modest 130 pages or so, an incredible love story, marital infidelity, a death, a framing, a murder and yet doesn't read as sensational (to me.) It's the best encapsulation of that era; it dissects every part of society, from the garage attendant's wife, to old money, to poor man made good, and examines how and why they interact. It covers dreams and disappointments and heartbreaking compromises, the moral and the amoral, lies and carelessness, brutality and kindness, extravagance and bitter penury, all in a lyrical fifty thousand words or less.

It's just incredible.

You like it then, Susannah?