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A review by trin
Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore
1.0
Much in the same way I shouldn't have tried drinking the pitcher of iced tea I'd left in the fridge since before Christmas, but I did, I should not have read this book.
I'm all about transformative works; The Great Gatsby, however, is my favorite novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald left enormous shoes to fill, stylistically, and I wouldn't envy anyone the task, but I've enjoyed books by McLemore before, and I do love the idea of a trans, queer, race-bent Gatsby. So I decided to give this a chance.
The opening didn't seem bad! I wish McLemore hadn't aged everyone down to teenagers, but I imagine that was imposed by the publisher and by this being a YA series. (Though why teenagers can read the OG versions of these classics, most of which are about adults, but need the remixes to be about teens is beyond me.) Daisy and Tom are a couple but not married and they don't have a child, so adultery and bad parenting are two sins immediately off the table. Treading into watered-down territory, but okay, fine. I still liked young trans man Nick and his cousin Daisy, who's been fully supportive of his being a boy but disavows him as her relative so she can continue to pass for white. There's some good compensatory tension there! As there is with everything imbued in the double meaning of this novel's title.
But then it got real dumb.
Did The Great Gatsby, one of the most perfect and precise novels ever written, ever need a plot about a missing pearl necklace, or about Nick's work on the stock market, or about -- for fuck's sake -- Daisy and Gatsby planning Daisy a debutante ball? Why were words wasted on all of that, yet Daisy and Jordan were left to
Nick and Gatsby's relationship is also, I'd argue, more nuanced and charged and more freaking romantic in the original than in this book. Fitzgerald didn't even do it on purpose, but because his characters are, even(/especially) when mysterious, so much more complex and complicated, shading naturally fills in around them. Every single character in this book is hideously defanged. Except for Tom, now a CW show villain, everyone secretly has good intentions and is good at heart. And oh boy, when I got to the sequence where McLemore remixes Myrtle Wilson's death and the events that follow, I almost screamed and threw my iPad across the room. They've made this brutal, harrowing climax into such a pathetic nothingburger -- a joke. There's no tension, no emotion, no meaning. McLemore has rendered The Great Gatsby, a book so laden with symbolism it's foisted upon a million ungrateful high school freshman to unpack, meaningless.
This version doesn't have anything to say about America. It doesn't even have anything interesting to say about queer people in the 1920s -- about which a wealth of interesting things could be said! They're all super nice and without significant flaws, though, and if they can trick one guy like he's a bully from a 1980s movie, then everything will be peachy. SNORE.
Uncoupled from Gatsby, there's material here to make a decent queer historical, as these are essentially OCs anyway. But the association only reduces the impact of McLemore's few good ideas. I feel like the best transformative works have something to say about the original text, but aside from the usual vague Daisy apologia -- and one really good idea about Gatsby's backstory that the author later unfortunately undercut -- we're off in what's essentially coffee shop AU territory. I have never been a fan of coffee shop AUs and I don't like this one. Instead of feeling big, bold, brave, queer, it feels cowardly. If the characters are only the most pure and good versions of themselves, who've never done anything worse than pour a bad latte -- well, what's the point? What are you learning and experiencing by reading about them? Don't queer folks deserve a chance to be beautiful jazz age monsters too?
The tea had big blooms of mold in it, by the way. I had to spit it out.
I'm all about transformative works; The Great Gatsby, however, is my favorite novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald left enormous shoes to fill, stylistically, and I wouldn't envy anyone the task, but I've enjoyed books by McLemore before, and I do love the idea of a trans, queer, race-bent Gatsby. So I decided to give this a chance.
The opening didn't seem bad! I wish McLemore hadn't aged everyone down to teenagers, but I imagine that was imposed by the publisher and by this being a YA series. (Though why teenagers can read the OG versions of these classics, most of which are about adults, but need the remixes to be about teens is beyond me.) Daisy and Tom are a couple but not married and they don't have a child, so adultery and bad parenting are two sins immediately off the table. Treading into watered-down territory, but okay, fine. I still liked young trans man Nick and his cousin Daisy, who's been fully supportive of his being a boy but disavows him as her relative so she can continue to pass for white. There's some good compensatory tension there! As there is with everything imbued in the double meaning of this novel's title.
But then it got real dumb.
Did The Great Gatsby, one of the most perfect and precise novels ever written, ever need a plot about a missing pearl necklace, or about Nick's work on the stock market, or about -- for fuck's sake -- Daisy and Gatsby planning Daisy a debutante ball? Why were words wasted on all of that, yet Daisy and Jordan were left to
Spoiler
fall in love almost entirely off page? I guess in part this choice was made because McLemore wanted Nick -- one of the great observers in literature -- to be too stupid to notice it, but not only is this untrue to his character, it's boring. As a writer, you can show the reader things that a narrator misses. That is a very cool trick that you can do.Nick and Gatsby's relationship is also, I'd argue, more nuanced and charged and more freaking romantic in the original than in this book. Fitzgerald didn't even do it on purpose, but because his characters are, even(/especially) when mysterious, so much more complex and complicated, shading naturally fills in around them. Every single character in this book is hideously defanged. Except for Tom, now a CW show villain, everyone secretly has good intentions and is good at heart. And oh boy, when I got to the sequence where McLemore remixes Myrtle Wilson's death and the events that follow, I almost screamed and threw my iPad across the room. They've made this brutal, harrowing climax into such a pathetic nothingburger -- a joke. There's no tension, no emotion, no meaning. McLemore has rendered The Great Gatsby, a book so laden with symbolism it's foisted upon a million ungrateful high school freshman to unpack, meaningless.
This version doesn't have anything to say about America. It doesn't even have anything interesting to say about queer people in the 1920s -- about which a wealth of interesting things could be said! They're all super nice and without significant flaws, though, and if they can trick one guy like he's a bully from a 1980s movie, then everything will be peachy. SNORE.
Uncoupled from Gatsby, there's material here to make a decent queer historical, as these are essentially OCs anyway. But the association only reduces the impact of McLemore's few good ideas. I feel like the best transformative works have something to say about the original text, but aside from the usual vague Daisy apologia -- and one really good idea about Gatsby's backstory that the author later unfortunately undercut -- we're off in what's essentially coffee shop AU territory. I have never been a fan of coffee shop AUs and I don't like this one. Instead of feeling big, bold, brave, queer, it feels cowardly. If the characters are only the most pure and good versions of themselves, who've never done anything worse than pour a bad latte -- well, what's the point? What are you learning and experiencing by reading about them? Don't queer folks deserve a chance to be beautiful jazz age monsters too?
The tea had big blooms of mold in it, by the way. I had to spit it out.