![]() ![]() The doomed affair of Gatsby and Daisy (who lives across the water in the tonier East Egg, Sands Point on the map) before the war permeates the novel. As his career and his troubled personal life progressed-with his wife, Zelda, a beautiful and wild southern belle very much like the character of Daisy in the book descending into severe mental illness-Fitzgerald would have even more reason to dwell in happier times. He is wistful about how quickly the present becomes the past even as it’s happening. Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled rather than hardboiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling.Īs a 1920s wunderkind, one of the figures who defined that decade of American raucousness and prosperity, it’s notable that Fitzgerald is a master of exploring and capturing nostalgia. Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled rather than hardboiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling. ![]() Gatsby also works with novelist Laura Lippman’s wonderful summation of noir, a world where “dreamers become schemers.” Jay Gatsby, like his creator, is both dreamer and schemer. A simple definition of noir holds that the hero is morally compromised and haunted by the past-that’s the book’s protagonist, Jay Gatsby, without question-and that crime will be an element of the story. Though the heyday of American noir was in the economically depressed 1930s and the war-ridden 1940s (which is also when the term noir was coined), Fitzgerald presciently wove many noir elements into the book that would be his greatest success. ![]() The incursion of noir themes into the book makes contemporaneous sense: Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon only five years later in 1930, and the magazines like Black Mask where many noir writers got their starts were already extant. Picking up the book again, now that a lot of my critical writing is about crime, I see Gatsby in a new, noir light. And Great Neck was proud of its literary history: there was even a short-lived restaurant called Great Scott! in the center of town when I was a child. The town had definitely lost its glamour by the time I grew up, but it had the things that make people like my parents want to raise families there: excellent schools, an easy commute, and an air of easy affluence which carried over from Fitzgerald’s era. Great Neck in the 1920s was a playground for writers, actors, and other luminaries: Fitzgerald ended up there at the recommendation of his friend and mentor Ring Lardner, and other boldfaced names had homes in the pretty town on the north shore of Long Island just across the Queens county line. Fitzgerald had lived in the town where I grew up-West Egg in the book, Great Neck on the map-and used the town as the setting for his 1925 book. Yes, I was a precocious reader, but I also had a good reason for diving into Gatsby. My love affair with Gatsby started early I probably read it for the first time when I was 11 or 12 and read it again every year until I was in my 20s. For a long time, whenever someone asked me what my favorite book was (an occupational hazard of being a book critic is that people ask this question a lot) I had an immediate and simple answer: The Great Gatsby by F. ![]()
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