Spring 2025 | Volume 7, Issue 2

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Gatsby at 100

Gatsby won. It remains. Some writers deny this and some are too conscious of it when they work, but all writers write, in part, to leave something that outlives them.
 

To be relevant for longer than their own mortality. And writers should care about that; it is the only thing that excuses the moodiness and poverty and distraction and self-indulgence and absence from things others call obligatory. Outliving one’s self is the only recompense for the lack of physical fullness that too many writers live with. Being disappointing isn’t unique to writers I suppose, but it’s good to at least try and compensate for that; to at least try and make your good moments better than normal, or even repeatable for people who pick up your work later. We owe the people who love us that. We may owe the people who dislike us that even more. 

Some of you will tell me that you don’t care for Gatsby, or even think about it. Some may even tell me that you are in an open revolt against its style or tone. I’ll tell you it doesn’t matter. It remains. Unvanquished. It won. You must confront it as you make your way through the discipline. Worse than that, you must endure reference to it even if you’ve spent your entire adult life running away from literature.

I do love Gatsby, but its perfection, almost geometrical in nature, has always made me uneasy. The book is exactly the right length. There is no wasted motion. It somehow manages to be both abstract and succinct, and there is something disturbing about that. Something heartbreaking about Fitzgerald morphing into a scientist. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, is better…and messier…artistic and overrun and grandiose and immature and emotional. It is Catholic and pure and European, as Gatsby is almost of a model of The American Protestant ethic…restrained, productive, seeking and finding a result. It is an ideal, a portraiture. It is always right on time. I respect it, but it has never ruined my day. 

There is a noteworthy exception to the statistical type of perfection the book produces (and no, I’m not referring to the ridiculous plot tropes—if anything they’re just proof that plot doesn’t matter, which is a win for all writers). Towards the end of Chapter 6, Fitzgerald has crafted a master scene that lays bare that Gatsby’s obsession is not for Daisy, but for an exact moment in time, and a Platonic conception of the real. It occurs in natural rhythm, without asides or rejoinders, but Fitzgerald doesn’t trust it. When Nick then tells Gatsby that he can’t repeat the past, and Gatsby retorts, “why of course you can,” the book becomes redundant for the first and last time. He tells us something we already know. He’s sure that he’s doing something important, and he needs to make sure that you know it too; it is excessive, unnecessary and violates a primary rule of fiction that demands that the author never explain his images. I used to think that line was a stain, but now I think it saves the entire book. Perfection isn’t artistic, and art is not math. We should celebrate and we should be humbled for it. In that, I see America in Fitzgerald—hauntingly great with massive caveats, asterisks and exceptions so gaping that they sometimes become the rule.

But Jay Gatsby will always be 32, and I will always love that. A sad eternity. But eternity nonetheless. I pray for a Heaven that allows both heartache and failure. I can never get enough of them here, and I haven’t yet worked hard enough to earn it.  Maybe it’s not eternity we need, but just more time to try for it.

-JR