Gary's comments (member since Feb 25, 2008)

Gary's comments from the GoodReviews: The Official Book Review Contest group.

i've written collaboratively over the internet for several years now, writing a hybrid form of renga [linked haiku] fun enough!

rivka, so I imbed that link* into the text i've already posted ?



[altho' the due date's probably wayyy past]


* also, all I got was

<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/revie... > Gary's review </a>

I.E., i think there's something AFTER
/revie ...

i'm still in the dark; i posted my "review" of the great gatsby here, in this conference: but apparently i didn't do some additional step.

if so could you please say it again, another way, so it can penetrate my concrete skull? thanks.

money: interesting how nick, inherited wealth, looks to the past, while gatsby, the entrepeneur, looks to the future. apt.

plus a contrarian note, on f. scott fitzgerald's style: i'm still not sold here. to me he's like a poet who collects all the rhymes before writing a poem; as with many films of orson welles, the episodic scenes are individually fascinating but cumulatively a patchwork of devices rather than an organic entity. imho. [extra points off for filching fabric from his wife.]

all i remember is hearing that Zelda Fitzgerald pretty much wrote at least half of Tender Is the Night, and I didn't know how much else of what else. I know men lack an extra X-chromosome, but still what a shock.

Kaye McDonough's book is entitled Zelda: Frontier Life in America published by City Lights [San Francisco:], probably out of print. Kaye and I gave a few readings together, when she lived here: a really great gal.

maureen, i've appended my notes to include zelda, as was already on my mind.

gatsby cannot be spotlit without illuminating zelda.

my friend poet kaye mcdonough has written on the subject, if you're ever researching it further.

<i>The Great Gatsby</i>.

Gary's review

First impressions, having just read it for the first time this month: questions I'm asking myself [aloud].

[Caution: Possible spoilers ahead]

It's sure fun enough, absorbing, poignant, provocative, to a point. The form overall seems as precise and flawless as a prize orchid, or a jewel of great price. It can be read in one sitting. The language is, from time to times, dazzling, even dizzying. The story itself takes a very poignant turn, with deep ironic commentary on the American way of life. It preserves a moment in our history as if in amber.

Yet do these traits speak well ... or can they also speak against its accepted greatness:

... the form so perfect, like a hothouse species, or like Hollywood formula, formulaic, so worked over, over and over, paint-by-the-numbers, little space seems left over for chance to take place during composition, for genuine discovery, surprise [by the author, and thence for the reader] ...

... rather like an extended short story or novella that effervesces over into a whole novel ...

... well-wrought prose with firework bursts of brilliant writing that captivate, scintillate, intoxicate, [settings, such as parties; scenes, such as a pair of couples amid a crisis; but also descriptive phrases tossed into a sentence here or there, like bright gems broken loose from a necklace of stars ... ] but thus a little self-conscious, distracting at times. Does the collage of prose styles cohere? [It's a strikingly bold attempt; compare it to what John Dos Passos was doing a few years before in Manhattan Transfer. And whose language is it? I.E., are the quotable metaphors F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebook aperçus, or insights of the narrator, who happens upon the lives of Gatsby and Daisy ... himself confessing literary aspirations but having written "solemn and obvious editorials" without any great pretensions [as "faceless" as Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. It starts creeping up on the reader in Chapter One, which begins in a plain, straightforward, declarative style, and then starts to effloresce: a voice with " ... a singing compulsion ...", " ... a wan, charming, discontented face....", " ... sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face ...", "... the silver pepper of the stars ...", and all these brilliant filagrees in a chapter that also repeats the word restless at least three times. Paragraph One, Chapter Two, another amazing phrase pops up "...spasms of bleak dust..." as if the narrator were parroting T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens.

These frissons of sensitive poetry are like collectible treasures; they could be anthologized into a little collection unto themselves: E.G., " ... the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games ... " Would the novel be any better or worse without them? Do the fits of hyper-aware language assist the ultimate aim of the forward motion of the story, and our insights into character, or undercut? [See F. Scott Fitzgerald's attempts to gather such scintilla, The Crack-Up ... atmospheres and snapshots and even bits of theme in search of some all-embracing subject ... an obsession many an American twentieth-century author, taken here to obsessive levels ... ? ...] ... maybe so, if you like jewels, and crystals, and crystal-construction ... while I happen to prefer unfoldment of the organic branch ...

... might the book over-reach a bit, aiming at an allegory of America, as the author had originally hoped ... when it might be seen instead as an extended prose proem ...? ...

... is Gatsby really ever fully portrayed as a person? He seems more like Fitzgerald trying write of himself as seen in a mirror, from the third person, through the persona of someone he's seen at a party, yet doesn't get past the surface of the glass, beyond the mask ... reality underlying appearance ... and so the narrator's friendship with him is kept at a distance for half of the way through, then serving, as his blind, ultimately to briefly be his only one true friend ... a guy with an incredible smile, who holds a torch for a gal for a really long time ... and in so doing finds himself living outside the law, yet not beyond the reality of popular morality of the times, in his quest to Get The Girl ... ... herself curiously more convincingly vivid as a particular voice than a face ...

... [what's interesting to me is how the secret of his past hearkens back to the war, and immediately after ... a trope that will prove emblematic, later on, with the existential hero, and noir] ...

... am I a sloppy reader or what: is the final handling of the backstory of George & Myrtle a bit arch [it's a spoiler how they link up to the front story ... beginning, "Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before....," the occurrence in question seeming as arch as that opening line ... as in uncanny quirks of fate commonplace in, say, soap opera ... ]

... [and, ultimately], is the novel, the novel in general, primarily an image of truth, or a record of manners?

I'm thinking here of how Somerset Maugham came in when the novel was still being seen as potential for an "image of truth" and turned the fatal switch with Of Human Bondage: novel as pot-boiler; the best-seller.

If the latter, as here, The Great Gatsby deserves five stars [note: now literature too has come to this: the star-rating system], quick-scan code for the shopper's eye]. Yet such use of the novel, fiction, seem to limit / constrict the medium's full potential, as mined by Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner ...

Compare the vacillating impressions of Gatsby, his origins, his success, and his ambitions, with those of William Faulkner's Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, more the Great American Novel, in my Good Reads logbook; the fruition of a series of distinctly remarkable novels beginning with Flags in the Dust, and this forming a kind of extended prequel, if you will, to part of The Sound and the Fury; although The U.S.A. Trilogy is also a close contender amongst my very best fictional good reads, as is Thomas Wolfe's magnum opus. My own all-time hands-down favorite book of F. Scott Fitzgerald remains The Pat Hobby Stories, along with some other of his post-Jazz Age stories.

p. s.
a case has been made for Zelda Fitzgerald having had a hand in the authorship of certain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works. i regret that i have not studied this enough to say anything intelligent as to how that bears on the novel at hand, except that it need be noted.


Well, that's my book report.

Wishing you all good reads.

GG