Pam's Book 9: The Great Gatsby

Okay, so I'm probably going to English teacher hell for this, but before this week I had never read The Great Gatsby. I feel that part of the blame lies on the shoulders of Mr. Hammond, my AP English teacher. If only we had read Gatsby instead of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Fucking Tess. I don't know if I've ever hated a literary character more (except maybe Scarlett O'Hara). Although, of course, I realize that there were innumerable times I could have picked up Gatsby instead of rereading, say, Pride and Prejudice for the fourteenth time. I'm not really sure what kept me from this book for so long. It was an easy, quick read, and very enjoyable.

My favorite quotations:

"'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted, across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'
"I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end." Yet who was the only one who was there for Gatsby at the end? Certainly not Daisy.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..." I can think of people like that. It's not malice, just carelessness.

"He must have come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." Poor Gatsby. To think your dream, your one great hope on which you've built your entire life, is so close, and then to find (or never live to find) that it never actually ever was.

I kept going back in my mind as I was reading to Paris in the '20's, and to Scott and Zelda's life together, there and elsewhere. Trish tells me that Zelda is neither so evil nor one-sided as Hemingway paints her to be, and that I need to read her memoir, so that should appear in a later blog. Still, it seems like old Scott knew a little something about dysfunctional relationships. I have some other Fitzgerald books on my shelves, inherited from a college roommate who took a class on the man, and I'm excited to read those now. I realize I haven't actually said much about the book itself in this post, but I feel that anything I could say about it has probably already been said, and eloquently, so I will leave it at my quotations and random commentary.