I saw this yesterday. I sat in a full theater in one of the most-self-importantly-intellectual capitals of the world and had it read to me for seven hours. It was an audience who would get off, in several ways, to say they had seen such a production. An audience that included Cornel West, and possibly less visibly famous intellectuals (there were a lot of very hairy men of an older generation in clothes of that aggressively inexpensive sort, all bought in the early eighties, all frayed miserably, all in shades of brown and green, at least). And I have to count myself among them (I can pick Cornel West out of a crowd after all) even if I don't like to admit anything of the sort - I'm not someone who talks about metafiction or deconstructs anything and I bolted when that guy tried to pick me up in Peets by telling me he was an author and his favorite playwright was Samuel Beckett.* But I'm in a theater to see The Great Gatsby, one of those books that gets called "the great American novel" without irony and we all had to read it in high school and, sitting there, in that theater that is growing warmer and warmer from all the hot air rising from the pre-production discussions, I had a moment of doubt. What if it isn't as good as I remember? (I remember it being the only novel I read in a high school class that I loved). What if it is overrated, pretentious drivel, with text that sounds like Hemingway educated at Princeton and platitudes about what we, as Americans, should think and feel, without the true realism of Steinbeck or the awareness of Ralph Ellison? What if it really should be regulated to high school classrooms where a good book is anything that can get through the obsessive self-involvement of the audience and the message is obvious enough that its light only has to shine through for a moment?

Then the play/reading started and I forgot all my worries. The moment Nick first held Daisy's hand and described her murmur as designed to get people to lean towards her, I was in love. I was in love the way we all are with Daisy at first. And then I was with Nick, on the outside, watching the parties, enjoying the cavalcade that surrounds him while he tries to maintain his middle-west propriety and rules of conduct, and we see him slipping, even if he doesn't. I flinched at the unthinking racism that dates the book. I watched as eyes rose over the ash heap and it shocked me again how much Tom reminds me of men I meet who really believe that Obama is ruining the country with his socialism and that we need to go back to a simpler time when they were less confused about their own place in the world (I'm not talking just about the ones on t.v. with tea bags stapled to their hats either). Tom is just as heart breaking as all the others. Tom, Wilson, Myrtle, Nick, Mr. Gatz, they all break my heart.

Having it read to you, you notice how many times Fitzgerald describes Jordon as "jaunty" and uses the word "wan." You can't help it. The flaws are there. But so is the power. When Nick says that this is a book about "the west" and describes the "green breast" of the land when it was first seen by the European settlers and asks us all to think about what it means to be an American, you can't help but think about it. It isn't a gimmick. It isn't meant as a joke or because the author felt he needed to ask to get published or to be considered an important writer. He was writing from his heart about what he loves and what he wants to understand and about the heartbreak of loss.

I walked home with my friend afterward and we talked about how his writing is akin to Heminway's in style, but that he was much more like Virginia Woolf with his sense of loss, the melancholy feeling that they both have, as they write looking back on events that they know will come to a tragic end. That "world-weariness" that represses any hope you might have when starting the book that things will work out well for anyone because, after all, we are human and therefore we will all die, one way or another. My friend, who is currently reading Mere Christianity talked about the difference between them and C.S. Lewis as the belief in Heaven. That Woolf and Fitzgerald don't believe in that better place to which we may all go, and to which we should all aspire. I was thinking about how much that sounded like something Mr. Gatz would have said (not the part about Woolf, or Lewis, about aspiring to Heaven, but don't tell her I said that).

I don't want to leave this page on that last discussion. This was not an intellectual exercise. Walking home in ten degree weather, bundling the scarf closer and turning up my collar and wondering exactly how stupid my refusal to wear hats is if I end up in the emergency room for frostbite on my ears, was as significant as the conversation. Having the conversation with this friend (she's actually the ex-girlfriend of one of my brothers) was significant. Her belief and my lack of. The streets we walked on, looking at the houses dating back and back (for us, US), a long time, and listening to the animated voices echoing off the dark houses in the clear night. The experience of the reading and thinking about what Fitzgerald was saying and bringing in the knowledge of other writers and their ideas and doing it all in Cambridge, of all places, was important, as important, as when I first read the book as a teenager and feel in love the first time.



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* This is a funny story. To get rid of him I told him mine was Tom Stoppard, which also happens to be true, and that I thought Shakespeare in Love was the best film ever made, which was a BIG lie. It was effective. No one should have to put up with Beckett fans while trying to have a cup of coffee.