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A review by kmg365
SparkNotes: The Great Gatsby by SparkNotes
1.0
Like many people, I was assigned this book in high school. I remember literally nothing about that reading, except that I hated the book. I can’t even remember the name of the teacher who assigned it, so thoroughly have I expunged the experience from my memory. It’s a foregone conclusion that I was too young to appreciate the book at the time. I was probably 13 or 14, and had led a pretty sheltered life.
So I thought it was time to give it another chance. Evidently at 52, I’m still too young to appreciate the novel.
The entire novel, apart from a few brief flashes of action, felt moribund. People sat. People talked. People drank. Occasionally, the people would drive from point A to point B to do more sitting, talking, and drinking. Even the car accident is described after the fact, and thus is presented as a static scene. The same technique is used for the shooting. We couldn’t be so lucky as to witness it-- we had to hear about it later after things had been cleaned up.
I was intrigued by Tom’s white supremacist ravings, but nothing came of them. He strides off muscularly and wealthily into the sunset with his wife, presumably to hone his assholeness to a fine edge.
The only part of the novel I found emotionally engaging was the end, when Nick was trying to convince people to come to Jay’s funeral. I actually did muster up some sadness for Gatsby then (for having the bad luck to fall for a selfish, empty-headed nothing like Daisy), and for Nick, but not really for anyone else. I would have preferred it if the entire novel had been condensed into 50 pages and presented as the backstory to a novel about the rest of Nick’s life back in the Midwest, where people are generally more sensible than the characters in this book.
So I thought it was time to give it another chance. Evidently at 52, I’m still too young to appreciate the novel.
The entire novel, apart from a few brief flashes of action, felt moribund. People sat. People talked. People drank. Occasionally, the people would drive from point A to point B to do more sitting, talking, and drinking. Even the car accident is described after the fact, and thus is presented as a static scene. The same technique is used for the shooting. We couldn’t be so lucky as to witness it-- we had to hear about it later after things had been cleaned up.
I was intrigued by Tom’s white supremacist ravings, but nothing came of them. He strides off muscularly and wealthily into the sunset with his wife, presumably to hone his assholeness to a fine edge.
The only part of the novel I found emotionally engaging was the end, when Nick was trying to convince people to come to Jay’s funeral. I actually did muster up some sadness for Gatsby then (for having the bad luck to fall for a selfish, empty-headed nothing like Daisy), and for Nick, but not really for anyone else. I would have preferred it if the entire novel had been condensed into 50 pages and presented as the backstory to a novel about the rest of Nick’s life back in the Midwest, where people are generally more sensible than the characters in this book.