The Great Gatsby

⚖The case for it

"Everyone who is anyone shows up to drink his booze," and almost none of them know him: the parties do more work in two pages than most novels manage in four hundred, and Fitzgerald needs fewer than two hundred, nine chapters, barely a wasted scene. The trick is Nick, a skeptical bystander vouching for an obsessive with a shady fortune until the man reads as tragic instead of pathetic. "You can't read a finer novel about class," one verdict runs, and the conversions confirm it: "I have a confession: I was a Great Gatsby hater," opens one review that ends in surrender, because reread at thirty-five the school romance turns out to be "wildly addictive, so intricate yet perfectly woven together." The green light was never about a girl.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"I hate every character in it. I hate the supposedly brilliant prose." The milder camp lands on "a good book, though it is so ridiculously overrated." The cast is the sticking point, rich people unhappy about riches, observed by a narrator too passive to matter, and "the overall shallowness of the characters frustrated me" is the polite version. Daisy barely exists on the page; one reader notes "things that came out of her mouth were things that she cried," sobbed, or laughed, an absence where the object of two men's ruin should stand. One famous review is a single line. At least it is short.

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings