Review: The Great Gatsby

Title: The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nationality: American
Year: 1925
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Great style, little substance

The outline

Widely proclaimed as one of the greatest novels of all time, Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties literary soap opera follows the decadent, trivial life of a group of young socialites.

Sample

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

The verdict

The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a beautifully written book. The final pages in particular are famously elegant and thought-provoking. However, despite this obvious literary brilliance I found it was a novel that was very difficult to warm to.

I was expecting something deeper, something more ambiguous, something where the characters didn’t seem so thin and distant. Maybe it seems more powerful if you’re surprised to find that beautiful people are ugly inside.

Like its characters, The Great Gatsby is ultimately shallow and has little of note to say. For me, Fitzgerald never got under the skin of his characters and that is what a novel like this needs. I liked the style, but this certainly isn't one of the best novels of the C20th to me.