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It’s popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. It’s not a social novel, like “Sister Carrie,” or a novel of manners, like “The House of Mirth,” or a novel about our national destiny, like “American Pastoral.” “Gatsby” is weirder than all those books it’s more like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere.
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Today the novel, like Gatsby himself, seems suspicious.Ī lot of the confusion stems from the fact that “Gatsby” isn’t like other great American books. In 1950, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling predicted that Gatsby’s story would lose its magnetism: Gatsby, Trilling wrote, represented the fantasy of “personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self,” while modern society urges young people to find “distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness.” (“The Great Zuckerberg” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) And yet, all the while, “Gatsby” has grown more beloved and resonant. Mencken thought it was “no more than a glorified anecdote”), and it continues to be an object of skepticism (Kathryn Schulz, in last week’s New York, writes that “Gatsby” is “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent”). It was poorly received when it was published (H. It’s short (only a hundred and fifty pages) its plot is absurd and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. On the one hand, it’s broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. Instead, he’s taken “The Great Gatsby” very seriously just as it is. He hasn’t tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. But he’s done it in exactly the right way. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned “Gatsby” into a theme-park ride. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial.