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Critic’s Notebook

Nearly a Century Later, We’re Still Reading — and Changing Our Minds About — Gatsby

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By Parul Sehgal

• Dec. 30, 2020

I’ve long held to the completely unsupported notion that a protagonist is simpler to write than a truly memorable supporting character. Sometimes just a silhouette — created with a few slashes of the pen, a few charismatic adjectives — seems the more unlikely accomplishment, born out of some surplus wit and energy, some surfeit of love for a fictional world that expresses itself in the desire to animate even its most minor participants.

F. Scott Fitzgerald excelled at this sort of character. Few can write a more vivid neighbor, train conductor or, more usually, bartender. Take Owl Eyes (or so he’s called, for his large spectacles), one of the many partygoers at Gatsby’s mansion. When we first meet him, he has wandered into the library and doesn’t seem able to escape — he stands paralyzed, staring at the books in inebriated admiration.

I wonder if we’re all Owl Eyes now. In the century or so since “The Great Gatsby” was published, we have been lost in Gatsby’s house, immured in a never-ending revival.

This revival will only get more crowded when the novel’s copyright expires as the calendar turns to 2021. January will see the publication of a new edition from Modern Library, with an introduction by Wesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York Times, and another from Penguin, introduced by the novelist Min Jin Lee. That month also brings a prequel, “Nick,” by Michael Farris Smith.

All this follows several films, theater adaptations and other retellings. The novel has been transplanted to post-9/11 Manhattan in Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” to 21st-century London (our bootlegger becomes a Russian arms-dealing billionaire) in Vesna Goldsworthy’s “Gorsky,” to the home of a Black family in contemporary North Carolina in Stephanie Powell Watts’s “No One Is Coming to Save Us.” Gatsby has inspired immersive theater, young adult novels, a Taylor Swift song — “Happiness,” on her latest record , weaves together lines and images from the novel. Even the most minor characters have had spinoffs — Pammie, age 3 in Fitzgerald’s book, has her own story told in “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter,” by Tom Carson. (Apparently she becomes LBJ’s confidante in Carson’s work; and honestly, why not at this point?) All this atop a heap of Fitzgeraldiana, new biographies and scholarship — to say nothing of the humming cottage industry dedicated to Zelda Fitzgerald, newly resurrected as a feminist heroine.

The literary term for this profusion of interpretations borne out of a novel’s wide influence and deep purchase on the imagination is insane glut .

Why doesn’t it irritate me more? Perhaps it’s because the book occupies such a peculiar place in the culture. Is there a major novel so established in the canon and curriculum whose literary merit and moral probity remain so regularly and passionately contested? We’re not speaking of books like “Huckleberry Finn,” mired in a confused, deathless debate about racist language and censorship. With “The Great Gatsby,” the question is simpler and stranger: Can Fitzgerald write? Is the book a masterpiece — what T.S. Eliot called “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” — or, as Gore Vidal put it, as Gore Vidal would, the work of a writer who was “barely literate”?

The novel has become subject to all its own barbs; every one of Fitzgerald’s bitter observations is lobbed back at his book in turn. As Nick wonders of Gatsby, so readers have wondered of the novel: Is this shallowness I perceive, or miraculous depth? Like Daisy, the book is derided as pretty and meretricious. Like Nick, it is accused of being passive, or worse — complicit in the spectacle it appears to criticize.

Even admirers have their own debates: The book is good, but great ?

Great — but not the greatness of assurance and cut-gem perfection. It’s the greatness of a vastly open, unstable, slithery text. Within the scaffold of its tidy, three-act structure and its carefully patterned symmetries, sprouts an unruly blend of stiff moralism and wild ambivalence, its infatuation with and contempt for wealth, its empathy alongside its desire to punish its characters.

One of the pleasures of writing about a book as widely read as “The Great Gatsby” is jetting through the obligatory plot summary. You recall Nick Carraway, our narrator, who moves next door to the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby on Long Island. Gatsby, it turns out, is pining for Nick’s cousin, Daisy; his glittering life is a lure to impress her, win her back. Daisy is inconveniently married to the brutish Tom Buchanan, who, in turn, is carrying on with a married woman, the doomed Myrtle. Cue the parties, the affairs, Nick getting very queasy about it all. In a lurid climax, Myrtle is run over by a car driven by Daisy. Gatsby is blamed; Myrtle’s husband shoots him dead in his pool and kills himself. The Buchanans discreetly leave town, their hands clean. Nick is writing the book, we understand, two years later, in a frenzy of disgust.

Fitzgerald was proud of what he had achieved. “I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written,” he crowed. The book baffled reviewers, however, and sold poorly. “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson.

That matter remains unsettled. The book has been treated as a beautiful bauble, fundamentally unserious. In a 1984 essay in The Times , John Kenneth Galbraith sniffed that Fitzgerald was only superficially interested in class. “It is the lives of the rich — their enjoyments, agonies and putative insanity — that attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social and political consequences escape him as he himself escaped such matters in his own life.”

This interpretation has been turned on its head. Both new editions make light of the book’s beauty — it’s the treatment of the grotesque that is so compelling (Morris compares the characters to the “Real Housewives”). Both make the case that the book’s value lies in its critique of capitalism. Lee describes Fitzgerald as “a fan of Karl Marx,” and writes that “Gatsby” remains “a modern novel by exploring the intersection of social hierarchy, white femininity, white male love and unfettered capitalism.” For Morris, too, there is no romance between Gatsby and Daisy but “capitalism as an emotion”: “Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier, senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. So the tragedy here is the death of the heart.”

The evidence exists, in Fitzgerald’s complicated way, as we look at the text and the biography. He was rived by bitterness and profound envy toward the rich. “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has colored my entire life and works,” he wrote to his agent. But this was the same man who, as a child, liked to pretend he was the foundling son of a medieval king. The same man who fell in love with Zelda because she looked expensive.

So much waffling, according to critics who want less equivocation, less moonlight and stronger moral stances. Except for those critics who find the moralizing heavy-handed and crave subtlety. What other waves of analysis await us as the new narratives rush in? How can one story sustain them all? As we’re borne back, ceaselessly into this one text, it becomes clear that courting admiration might be one path to literary immortality, but courting endless interpretation might be the safer bet. After all, there’s great honor in being a supporting character.

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal .

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The Great Gatsby

By f. scott fitzgerald.

'The Great Gatsby' tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age, in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The Great Gatsby tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age , in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby. Through Nick’s narration, readers are exposed to the dangers of caring too much about the wrong thing and devoting themselves to the wrong ideal.

Gatsby’s pursuit of the past central to my understanding of this novel. Fitzgerald created Gatsby as a representative of the American dream , someone who, despite all of his hard work, did not achieve the one thing he wanted most in life.

Wealth and the American Dream

Another part of this novel I found to be integral to my understanding of the time period was the way that wealth and the American dream did not exist alongside one another. The American dream suggests that through hard work and determination, anyone can achieve the dream life they’re looking for.

On the outside, Gatsby does just that. He raises himself out of poverty and makes his fortune (albeit not through entirely legal means). He worked hard and remained focused. For those attending his parties or who have seen his mansion, he is living the best possible life–an embodiment of the American dream. But, he’s missing the one thing he really wanted to achieve–Daisy’s love and commitment. His pursuit of wealth was not for wealth alone. It was for something that, he realized, money can’t buy.

It was impossible for me not to feel moved by the bind Gatsby got himself into. He put Daisy on a pedestal, one that required she fulfill her end of the bargain if he fulfilled his. He got rich and acquired the means to give her the kind of life she wanted. But, Daisy was unwilling to separate herself from her husband, Tom Buchanan, and return to Gatsby. She ended up being more interested in maintaining her social status and staying in the safety of her marriage than living what might’ve been a happy life.

Daisy Buchanan and the Treatment of Women

Her character is often deeply romanticized, with her actions painted as those of a woman torn between what she knows is right and her inability to guide her own life. However, I always return to the strange conversation she shares with Nick, revealing her concerns about raising a daughter. The quote from The Great Gatsby reads:

I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

This quote proved to me that Daisy is well aware of her position in the world, and she turns to the safety of being “a beautiful little fool” when she needs to be. It’s the only way she feels she can survive.

There’s something to be said for the depiction of Daisy as a victim. Still, her callous treatment of Gatsby at the end of the novel, seen through her refusal to attend his funeral and dismissal of the destruction she caused, is hard to empathize with. Daisy may be at Tom’s mercy for a great deal, her livelihood, and her social status, but when she walks away from the death of a man she supposedly loved, it feels as though her true nature is revealed. She’s a survivor more than anything else and didn’t deserve the pedestal that Gatsby put her on. This is part of what makes Gatsby’s story so tragic. He was pure in a way that no other character in the novel was. He had one thing he wanted, and he was determined to do anything to get it. That one thing, Daisy’s love, was what let him down.

I also found it interesting to consider the differences between Jordan’s character and Daisy’s and how they were both treated. Jordan, while certainly no saint, is regarded as a dangerous personality. She sleeps with different men, appears to hold no one’s opinion above her own, and has made an independent career for herself as a golfer (a surely male-dominated world). I continue to ask myself how much of Nick’s depiction of Jordan is based on her pushing the envelope of what a woman “should” do in the 1920s ?

The Great Gatsby and Greatness

One of the novel’s defining moments is when Nick realizes who was truly “great” and why. Gatsby wasn’t “Great” because of his wealth, home, parties, or any other physical item he owned. He was great because of the single-minded pursuit of his dream. His incredible personality and determination made him a one-of-a-kind man in Nick’s world. This realization about who Gatsby was and what he represented was driven home by his death and the lack of attendees at his funeral. No one, aside from Nick, realizes the kind of man he was. Those he might’ve called friends were using him for the money, possession, or social status they might have attained. But, Nick realizes that none of these things made the man “great.”

The Great Gatsby as a Historical Document

Finally, I find myself considering what the novel can tell us about the United States post-World War I and during the financial boom of the roaring twenties. Without didactically detailing historical information, the novel does provide readers with an interesting insight into what the world was like then.

The characters, particularly those who attend Gatsby’s parties, appear to have nothing to lose. They’ve made it through the war, are financially better off than they were before, and are more than willing to throw caution to the wind. Fitzgerald taps into a particular culture, fueled by a new love for jazz music, financial stability, prohibition and speakeasies, and new freedoms for women. The novel evokes this culture throughout each page, transporting readers into a very different time and place.

The novel conveys a feeling of change to me, a realization that the American dream may not be all it’s cut out to be and that the world was never going to be the same again after World War I. It appears that this is part of what was fueling Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby and his plot choices.

What did early reviewers think of The Great Gatsby ?

Early reviews of The Great Gatsby were not positive. Reviewers generally dismissed the novel, suggesting that it was not as good as Fitzgerald’s prior novels. It was not until after this death that it was elevated to the status it holds today.

What is the message of The Great Gatsby ?

The message is that the American dream is not real and that wealth does not equal happiness. Plus, optimism might feel and seem noble but when it’s misplaced it can be destructive.

Is Jay Gatsby a good or bad character?

Gatsby is generally considered to be a good character. He did illegal things to gain his fortune but it was with the best intentions–regaining the love of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth.

Did Daisy actually love Gatsy?

It’s unclear whether or not she loved Gatsby. But, considering her actions, it seems unlikely she loved him during the novel.

What does Nick learn from Gatsby?

Nick learns that the wealth of East and West Egg are a cover for emptiness and moral bankruptcy. The men and women he met are devoid of empathy or love for one another.

The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Enduring Classic of the Jazz Age

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Great Gatsby Review

The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age. It follows Nick Carraway as he uncovers the truth behind his mysterious neighbor’s wealth and dreams. The novel explores the consequences of wealth and suggests that the American dream is an unrealistic expectation.

• Realistic setting. 
• Interesting and provoking dialogue.
• Memorable characters.
• Limited action and emotions. 
• Several unlikeable characters. 
• Leaves readers with questions.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Why do we keep reading the great gatsby , arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we keep reading The Great Gatsby ? Why do some of us keep taking our time reading it? F. Scott Fitzgerald kept it short. A week is unwarranted. It should be consumed in the course of a day. Two at most. Otherwise, all the mystery seeps away, leaving Jay Gatsby lingering, ethereal but elusive, like cologne somebody else is wearing.

I have read The Great Gatsby four times. Only in this most recent time did I choose to attack it in a single sitting. I’m an authority now. In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book—booooo, Jordan; just boo. And Mr. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir; Gatsby was your friend . In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again. I know of someone—a well-heeled white woman in her midsixties—who reads this book every year. What I don’t know is how long it takes her. What is she hoping to find? Whether Gatsby strikes her as more cynical, naive, romantic, or pitiful? After decades with this book, who emerges more surprised by Nick’s friendship with Gatsby? The reader or Nick?

In this way, The Great Gatsby achieves hypnotic mystery. Who are any of these people—Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. But mostly it’s a premonition.

Each time, its fineness announces itself on two fronts. First, as writing. Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. “The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses”? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life.

The second front entails the book’s heartlessness. It cuts deeper every time I sit down with it. No one cares about anyone else. Not really. Nick’s affection for Gatsby is entirely posthumous. Tragedy tends to need some buildup; Fitzgerald dunks you in it. The tragedy is not that usual stuff about love not being enough or arriving too late to save the day. It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas.

Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion. We might not have been ready to hear that in 1925, even though the literature of industrialization demanded us to notice. The difference between Fitzgerald and, say, Upton Sinclair, who wrote, among other tracts, The Jungle , is that Sinclair was, among many other things, tagged a muckraker and Fitzgerald was a gothic romantic, of sorts. Nonetheless, everybody’s got coins in their eyes.

This is to say that the novel may not make such an indelible first impression. It’s quite a book. But nothing rippled upon its release in 1925. The critics called it a dud! I know what they meant. This was never my novel. It’s too smooth for tragedy, under wrought. Yet I, too, returned, seduced, eager to detect. What— who? —have I missed? Fitzgerald was writing ahead of his time. Makes sense. He’s made time both a character in the novel and an ingredient in the book’s recipe for eternity. And it had other plans. The dazzle of his prose didn’t do for people in 1925 what it’s done for everybody afterward. The gleam seemed flimsy at a time when a reader was still in search of writing that seeped subcutaneously.

The twenties were a drunken, giddy glade between mountainous wars and financial collapse. By 1925, they were midroar. Americans were innovating and exploring. They messed around with personae. Nothing new there. American popular entertainment erupted from that kind of messy disruption of the self the very first time a white guy painted his face black. By the twenties, Black Americans were messing around, too. They were as aware as ever of what it meant to perform versions of oneself—there once were Black people who, in painting their faces black, performed as white people performing them. So this would’ve been an age of high self-regard. It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity evident to all as distinctly, keenly, robustly, hilariously, terrifyingly, alluringly American. Or the inverse: the identity is a conjurer of fortune.

This is the sort of classic book that you didn’t have to be there for. Certain people were living it. And Fitzgerald had captured that change in the American character: merely being oneself wouldn’t suffice. Americans, some of them, were getting accustomed to the performance of oneself. As Gatsby suffers at Nick’s place during his grand reunion with Daisy, he’s propped himself against the mantle “in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.” (He’s actually a nervous wreck.) “His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock.” Yes, even the clock is in on the act, giving a performance as a timepiece.

So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over? Well, the premonition about performance is another part of it, and to grasp that, you probably did have to be there in 1925. Live performance had to compete with the mechanical reproduction of the moving image. You no longer had to pay for one-night-only theater when a couple times a day you could see people on giant screens, acting like people . They expressed, gestured, pantomimed, implied, felt. Because they couldn’t yet use words—nobody talked until 1927 and, really, that was in order to sing—the body spoke instead. Fingers, arms, eyes. The human gist rendered as bioluminescence. Often by people from the middle of nowhere transformed, with surgery, elocution classes, a contract, and a plainer, Waspier name, into someone new. So if you weren’t reinventing yourself, you were likely watching someone who had been reinvented.

The motion picture actually makes scant appearances in this book but it doesn’t have to. Fitzgerald was evidently aware of fame. By the time The Great Gatsby arrived, he himself was famous. And in its way, this novel (his third) knows the trap of celebrity and invents one limb after the next to flirt with its jaws. If you’ve seen enough movies from the silent era or what the scholars call the classical Hollywood of the thirties (the very place where Fitzgerald himself would do a stint), it’s possible to overlook the glamorous phoniness of it all. It didn’t seem phony at all. It was mesmerizing. Daisy mesmerized Gatsby. Gatsby mesmerized strangers. Well, the trappings of his Long Island mansion in East Egg, and the free booze, probably had more to do with that. He had an aura of affluence. And incurs some logical wonder about this fortune: How? Bootlegger would seem to make one only so rich.

A third of the way into the book, Nick admits to keeping track of the party people stuffed into and spread throughout Gatsby’s mansion. And the names themselves constitute a performance: “Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull,” Nick tells us. “Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys.” There’s even poor “Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.” This is a tenth of the acrobatic naming that occurs across a mere two pages, and once Fitzgerald wraps things up, you aren’t at a party so much as a movie-premiere after-party.

Daisy’s not at Gatsby’s this particular night, but she positions herself like a starlet. There’s a hazard to her approximation of brightness and lilt. We know the problem with this particular star: She’s actually a black hole. Her thick, strapping, racist husband, Tom, enjoys playing his role as a boorish cuckold-philanderer. Jordan is the savvy, possibly kooky, best friend, and Nick is the omniscient chum. There’s something about the four and sometimes five of them sitting around in sweltering rooms, bickering and languishing, that predicts hours of the manufactured lassitude we call reality TV. Everybody here is just as concocted, manifested. And Gatsby is more than real—and less. He’s symbolic. Not in quite the mode of one of reality’s most towering edifices, the one who became the country’s forty-fifth president. But another monument, nonetheless, to the peculiar tackiness of certain wealth dreams. I believe it was Fran Lebowitz who called it. Forty-five, she once said, is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” And Gatsby is the former James Gatz’s idea of the same.

Maybe we keep reading this book to double-check the mythos, to make sure the chintzy goose on its pages is really the golden god of our memories. It wasn’t until reading it for the third time that I finally was able to replace Robert Redford with the blinkered neurotic that Leonardo DiCaprio made of Gatsby in the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of the book. Nick labels Gatsby’s manner punctilious. Otherwise, he’s on edge, this fusion of suavity, shiftiness, and shadiness. Gatsby wavers between decisiveness and its opposite. On a drive with Nick where Gatsby starts tapping himself “indecisively” on the knee. A tic? A tell? Well, there he is about to lie, first about having been “educated at Oxford.” Then a confession of all the rest: nothing but whoppers, and a tease about “the sad thing that happened to me”—self-gossip. Listening to Gatsby’s life story is, for Nick, “like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.”

This is a world where “anything can happen”—like the fancy car full of Black people that Nick spies on the road (“two bucks and a girl,” in his parlance) being driven by a white chauffeur. Anything can happen, “even Gatsby.” (Especially, I’d say.) Except there’s so much nothing. Here is a book whose magnificence culminates in an exposé of waste—of time, of money, of space, of devotion, of life. There is death among the ash heaps in the book’s poor part of town. Jordan Baker is introduced flat out on a sofa “with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.” It’s as likely to be an actual object as it is the idea of something else: the precarious purity of their monotonous little empire.

We don’t know who James Gatz from North Dakota is before he becomes Jay Gatsby from Nowhere. “Becomes”—ha. Too passive. Gatsby tosses Gatz overboard. For what, though? A girl, he thinks. Daisy. A daisy. A woman to whom most of Fitzgerald’s many uses of the word murmur are applied. But we come back to this book to conclude her intentions, to rediscover whether Gatsby’s standing watch outside her house after a terrible night portends true love and not paranoid obsession. And okay, if it is obsession, is it at least mutual? That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America .

Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large at the New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine , where he writes about popular culture and cohosts, with Jenna Wortham, the podcast Still Processing . For three years, he was a staff writer at Grantland , where he wrote about movies, television, and the role of style in professional sports, and cohosted the podcast Do You Like Prince Movies? , with Alex Pappademas. Before that, he spent eleven years as a film critic at the Boston Globe , where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Introduction by Wesley Morris to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Wesley Morris. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

‘The Great Gatsby’ review (the book, that is, circa 1925)

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Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” opens wide this Friday. Eighty-eight years before -- to the day -- the Los Angeles Times ran this review of the original “The Great Gatsby,” the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Today, perception of the book’s reception in 1925 varies -- some say it was successful , others that it was a dismal failure -- but our review, by Lillian C. Ford, is purely positive. And she captures something of what has made the book a classic.

“The Seamy Side of Society,” read the headline, with this below: “In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a New Kind of Underworld Character and Throws the Spotlight on the Jaded Lives of the Idle Rich.” The full book review follows:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who won premature fame in 1920 as the author of “This Side of Paradise,” a book that first turned into literary material the flapper of wealthy parents and of social position, whose principal lack was inhibitions, has in “The Great Gatsby” written a remarkable study of today. It is a novel not to be neglected by those who follow the trend of fiction.

Wisely, Mr. Fitzgerald tells his story through the medium of Nick Carroway [sic], who, after graduation from Yale in 1915 had “participated in the delayed Teutonic migration known as the great war.” When the story opens, Carroway had left his western home and had gone east to learn the bond business. He was living in a tiny house at West Egg, Long Island, near an emblazoned mansion owned by the great Gatsby, an almost mythical person who lived sumptuously, knew no one, but entertained everyone at his great parties given Saturday nights.

Very gradually this Gatsby is revealed as a restless, yearning, baffled nobody, whose connection with bootleggers and bond thieves is suggested, but never mapped out, an odd mixture of vanity and humility, of overgrown ego and of wistful seeker after life.

Across the bay from Gatsby’s mansion, in one of the white palaces of fashionable East Egg, lived Tom and Daisy Buchanan, transplanted from Chicago, but wealthy enough to flourish anywhere. Polo, jazz, cocktails were their earmarks. He, who had been a famous football end a few years before, was now “a sturdy straw-haired man of 30 year of age, with a hard mouth and supercilious manner.” Of his wife, Daisy, Mr. Fitzgerald tells us: “Her face was sad and lovely, with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting thing hovering in the next hour.”

Daisy soon confided to Nick that Buchanan had “a girl” and Buchanan verified this by asking Nick to a New York party, in which the blowsy wife of a village garage-keeper appeared as the mistress of a week-end flat supported by Buchanan.

That Daisy was humiliated, discomfited, wearied, was her not-too-zealously guarded secret. So when she met Gatsby and discovered in him an old lover, to whom she had been engaged when he was a lieutenant in a training camp, it was not strange that she should dally with him once more.

But it is for no such ordinary denouement that Mr. Fitzgerald tells his tale. Instead, he builds up a tense situation in which Daisy has the chance to choose Gatsby, with his doubtful antecedents and mysterious present connections, or to be as false as it has ever fallen to the lot of woman to be. She took the meaner way, the safe way, and plotted with her husband to save herself from smirch while letting Gatsby in for the worst that could befall him.

Character could not be more skillfully revealed than it is here. Buchanan and his wife, secure, but beneath contempt, standing shoulder to shoulder in the crisis, is a sad picture. “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The story is powerful as much for what is suggested as for what is told. It leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder, in which fact after fact, implication after implication is pondered over, weighed and measured. And when all are linked together, the weight of the story as a revelation of life and as a work of art becomes apparent. And it is very great. Mr. Fitzgerald has certainly arrived.

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Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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• Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of The Great Gatsby

T he main book review in the May 11, 1925, issue of TIME earned several columns of text, with an in-depth analysis of the book’s significance and the author’s background.

But, nearly a century later, you’ve probably never heard of Mr. Tasker’s Gods , by T.F. Powys, much less read it.

Meanwhile, another book reviewed in the issue, earning a single paragraph relegated to the second page of the section, has gone down in history as one of the most important works in American literature — and, to many, the great American novel. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , published exactly 90 years ago, on April 10, 1925.

TIME’s original review, though noting Fitzgerald’s talent, gave little hint of the fame waiting for the book:

THE GREAT GATSBY—F. Scott Fitzgerald—Scribner—($2.00). Still the brightest boy in the class, Scott Fitzgerald holds up his hand. It is noticed that his literary trousers are longer, less bell-bottomed, but still precious. His recitation concerns Daisy Fay who, drunk as a monkey the night before she married Tom Buchanan, muttered: “Tell ’em all Daisy’s chang’ her mind.” A certain penniless Navy lieutenant was believed to be swimming out of her emotional past. They gave her a cold bath, she married Buchanan, settled expensively at West Egg, L. I., where soon appeared one lonely, sinister Gatsby, with mounds of mysterious gold, ginny habits and a marked influence on Daisy. He was the lieutenant, of course, still swimming. That he never landed was due to Daisy’s baffled withdrawal to the fleshly, marital mainland. Due also to Buchanan’s disclosure that the mounds of gold were ill-got. Nonetheless, Yegg Gatsby remained Daisy’s incorruptible dream, unpleasantly removed in person toward the close of the book by an accessory in oil-smeared dungarees.

But not everyone had trouble seeing the future: in a 1933 cover story about Gertrude Stein, the intellectual icon offered her prognostications on the literature of her time. F. Scott Fitzgerald, she told TIME, “will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten.”

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“The Great Gatsby”: Try Again, Old Sport

It would be fun not to know that Baz Luhrmann’s new movie is an adaptation, not to have read the book that it’s an adaptation of, not to bother comparing the movie to its source or evaluating its fidelity to or imaginative reinterpretation of the novel, but simply to watch “The Great Gatsby” as a movie that brings some notable actors together in a sumptuously-realized Jazz Age extravaganza to tell a tumble of good stories—of a lost love fleetingly recaptured, a couple of marriages unhinged, a crime unsolved, lives violently lost, a fledgling romance dissolved, the disillusionment of a New York newcomer, and, overall, of the end of a time of fabled exuberance—by way of vividly conceived characters and finely rhetorical dialogue. It wouldn’t make the resulting movie any better, but it would at least make for a source of wonder that an early-twenty-first-century screenwriter could offer up such a rich lode of material, regardless of the use made of it.

Yet, unlike the “Quixote” of Pierre Menard—the latter-day word-for-word recreation of the novel that, Borges joked, would be an even greater act of imagination than is Cervantes’s account of his contemporary world—Fitzgerald’s “Gatsby” would still be a greater achievement than that of Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, for the same reason that the novel became widely acclaimed and popular decades after its own time. “The Great Gatsby,” which was published in 1925, is a work of brilliant, fine-tuned clairvoyance—it sounded the death knell for a generation that was still alive. Beside the book’s intrinsically romantic qualities (and a doomed romance is often even more popularly romantic than one that works out), it reveals how Prohibition—which became the law of the land in 1919—infected the American character and offers a dim view of the financial markets that foreshadows the 1929 crash. The book is a cautionary tale that was offered to readers who, at the time, sought no caution. In the retrospective post-Depression view, however, “The Great Gatsby” all made perfect sense, its iridescent beauty and poetic fancy appearing as no more than a bright and floating bubble that, as everyone knew, had catastrophically burst. It’s easy to be cautionary after things go to hell; Fitzgerald saw, and warned of, hell breaking through the collective illusion of paradise.

The filmmakers’ most audacious creation is a framing story that renders the book’s predictive power explicit: that of Nick Carraway, who, in December, 1929, checks into a clinic to get off alcohol and to get over an apparent breakdown (or what Fitzgerald, writing about his own mental and physical crisis in 1936, called his “Crack Up”). In the clinic, Nick is induced by his doctor to delve into his past—by means of writing—and, supplied with a typewriter, he undertakes a retrospective view of his life as it led to his collapse and begins it with the first words of “The Great Gatsby,” which, as he writes the words, becomes the story that’s shown on screen. The framing device sets the movie explicitly in the context of the burst Wall Street bubble and the nation’s collective breakdown, the economic collapse as well as the rampant gangsterism that was a mere sanguinary trickle in the novel’s 1922 setting but which, by the late twenties, became a world-famous bloodletting. (Fascinatingly, the 1949 film of the novel updates the action to 1928 and sets it explicitly in the milieu of gangland murders and the Wall Street boom-time “gravy train”—and also establishes Nick Carraway as a former aspiring writer.)

The conceit of Nick Carraway as the stand-in for Fitzgerald may not be quite exact, though. Famously, Fitzgerald himself had lost an early but great love due to his own poverty and then, soon thereafter and quickly, made a big pile of money—but let Fitzgerald tell the story, as he did in 1936, in the autobiographical essay “Handle with Care” (the sequel to the title essay of the book “The Crack-Up”):

It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.

In other words, Fitzgerald had been in love with Ginevra King , who instead married a wealthy young man. Soon thereafter, Fitzgerald, a successful writer, married Zelda Sayre. Nick Carraway may have learned where his friends’ money came from and headed back to the Midwest (so did Fitzgerald, in the summer of 1919, where he wrote “This Side of Paradise”), but Fitzgerald returned to New York with “the jingle of money in his pocket” and became a Gatsby-like overnight grandee of wild parties.

Fitzgerald’s literary and personal conception of the aphrodisiac power of money, though, was remote to two of the most important writers of the day—D. H. Lawrence, and Fitzgerald’s friend Ernest Hemingway, whose prime themes are virility and vitality, the physical energy and mental discipline which carry a sexual charge. In effect, they wrote of the higher animal prowling around the edges of a society and making incursions; Fitzgerald, however, wrote of society, remained an insider, and his view of social gamesmanship and the finely-calibrated inflections and higher frequencies with which insiders speak to each other—and the forceful desires that those glittering games both conceal and express—is the essence of his poetic vision of the world, the charm of his despair.

The problem with Luhrmann’s film is that it’s under the top. For all of its lurching and gyrating party scenes, for all the inflated pomp of the Gatsby palace and the Buchanan mansion, for all the colorful clothing and elaborate personal styling, Luhrmann takes none of it seriously, and makes none of it look remotely alluring, enticing, fun. His whizzing 3-D cinematography offers lots of motion but no seduction; his parties are turbulent and raucous without being promising, without holding out the allure of magical encounters. They’re in the story, of course, those encounters—there’s no story without them—but Luhrmann, a man of his times, has no patience for mystery, no sense of true and brazen immodesty. He may have spent a lot of money to put his grandiose vision of the novel onto the screen, but he seems to be apologizing for it in advance. There was something in that most profligate night life, in the obscenely indulgent expenditures of the rich on destructive amusements for themselves and their friends and the hangers-on, that had a diabolical appeal to Fitzgerald—but it has none for Luhrmann, and the movie offers none.

The same is true of the casting and the acting. Leonardo DiCaprio has the laser-fix eyebeams and the megawatt smile, but not the sense of being—which Fitzgerald mentions in the book—“an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” DiCaprio’s speech, with its J.F.K.-tinged accent, is simply and patently absurd, and there’s no roughness whatsoever to his character, none of life’s burrs or scrapes, no tinge of real power. And he’s the best among the principals. Carey Mulligan, though a fine actress, is simply overmatched by the part of Daisy Buchanan; she doesn’t invest the character with style or with substance, doesn’t have a sufficiently high-handed irony or sense of intimate secrecy. She plays the role entirely out front, as if in keeping with a cynical conception—in keeping with Luhrmann’s superficial churning of the party scenes—of the young woman of impossible dreams being an ordinary person of not-unusual substance or character whose wonder exists only in Gatsby’s fantastic visions. Here, too, Luhrmann—unlike Fitzgerald—is unable to take society seriously, to recognize the extraordinary character that extraordinary manners both hide and (for those attuned to them) display. Joel Edgerton brings crude weight to the character of Tom Buchanan but not the refinement of wealth; as Nick Carraway, Tobey Maguire plays a bit too bewildered, too awkward and unknowing. The simplicity of Luhrmann’s conception filters into their portrayals.

That notion brings to mind what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s most famous sentence, from the essay “The Crack-Up,” in which, preparing to describe his own breakdown, he adds:

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

The movie conveys the sense of waste but not of what was wasted, of the superfluous but not of excess, and of the phony but not of the gloriously theatre of life. In its reductive way, it not only doesn’t display two opposed ideas; it offers no ideas at all.

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Broadway’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ shines a musical spotlight on America's favorite toxic couple

Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada spill on what it’s like to take on one of the most famous relationships in literary history—on stage.

Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada crackle with chemistry, even from on opposite coasts of the country. The two will soon share a Broadway stage in The Great Gatsby , a new musical based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel about obsession and indulgence in Jazz Age New York; he’s playing eternal striver Jay Gatsby, and she’s the unattainable Daisy Buchanan. But Jordan recently had to take a work trip to San Francisco while his co-star continued rehearsing in NYC, and as they reunite on Zoom for this interview, Noblezada is excited to share what he was missing. “We’re making so many changes. In the first scene, you come in on a camel!” she jokes. “Great,” Jordan deadpans back. “I approve of that.”

Fitzgerald’s masterpiece entered the public domain in 2021, and many have rushed to theatricalize it since. Multiple musical versions are dancing around; one debuted in Massachusetts last year and another, Gatsby , will be at the American Repertory Theater this summer. But Jordan and Nobelzada’s version—directed by Marc Bruni, with a book by Kait Kerrigan and songs by Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland—is the first to make it to Broadway. After a buzzy run last fall at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse , the production begins previews at the Broadway Theatre on March 29 and opens on April 25 (on the last day of Tony eligibility ). 

Jordan and  Noblezada are Time Out New York ’s cover stars for March and our spring preview of the Broadway season. Their photoshoot took place at The Plaza’s Palm Court and inside its Fitzgerald Suite —appropriate given this exact setting in the book.

“I know there are other  Gatsby s  around,” Noblezada says. “But it’s not a competition. Because the book itself is so grand, there’s not just one way to do The Great Gatsby .” Both actors know the source material well: Jordan raves about the audiobook narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal , and Noblezada admits to having watched the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation “so many times.” This version takes a few creative liberties with the story; notably, it is no longer told solely from the viewpoint of Daisy’s cousin Nick Carraway (played by Noah J. Ricketts), which allows the other characters to share their own firsthand perspectives. 

Because the book itself is so grand, there’s not just one way to do The Great Gatsby.

“There’s that old adage that musicals happen when characters are feeling such strong emotions that they can’t be put into words, so they have to sing,” Jordan says. “That lends itself to the epic quality of this story. We’re being handed the keys to these iconic characters and then saying, ‘Let’s take them to another level.’ And even though they’re classic literary characters, there’s so much mystery. We get to fill in the blanks.”

Jordan and Noblezada are veterans of bad romance on Broadway: He was shot to death in  Bonnie and Clyde  and  West Side Story ; she committed suicide in  Miss Saigon  and was consigned to the underworld in  Hadestown . Perhaps because their real-life relationships are so stable—Jordan and his longtime wife Ashley Spencer share a four-year-old daughter, and Noblezada has been dating her  Hadestown  costar Reeve Carney since 2019—they enjoy indulging in drama onstage.  The Great Gatsby  is certainly rife with it.

“Like most tragic love stories, it’s really toxic,” Jordan says. “I think if you look at it objectively, you’re like, this is not healthy. But that’s the thing that you’re drawn to the most: It’s people experiencing love in its raw form. When you experience love in its natural state, it is very irrational.”

And seductive, too. Gatsby and Daisy’s affair may be dysfunctional but it’s also swoon-worthy—as are Jordan and Noblezada when draped in costume designer Linda Cho’s Roaring Twenties finery—and the stars share a few steamy scenes together. That’s where chemistry comes in.

We’re being handed the keys to these iconic characters and then saying, ‘Let’s take them to another level.’

 “I’ve seen people that don’t like each other on stage, and I can tell,” Jordan says. “You have to find some things that you really like about the other person, things that you ‘fall in love’ with.” Noblezada credits their easy intimacy to mutual trust. “I want to be able to feel like I’m safe onstage, and that I can play and be supported,” she explains. “Thankfully, I feel like that with Jeremy. We can also have a laugh, which is really nice.”

“Yeah,” Jordan says. “I like to whisper fart jokes into her ear.”

The stars understand that their roles come with baggage, and they’re steeling themselves to carry it. “Understandably, people are going to have expectations,” says Noblezada. “I kind of felt like this when I did Miss Saigon . A lot of people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re in the shadow of Lea Salonga, how will you ever fill the shoes of this incredible superstar?’ It’s the same with this character: How can you do it?”

She hopes that audiences will be open to the excitement of a theatrical version of the story they love. “Just like Gatsby never throws the same party twice, it’s never the same show twice,” she says. “That’s part of the joy of live theater—just surrendering to the experience, because it really is a party and it really does tug at the heartstrings.” 

“We are unabashedly trying to make a Broadway hit,” Jordan adds, sounding not unlike Jay Gatsby. “And I think we are on our way to doing that.”

The Great Gatsby starts previews on March 29 at the Broadway Theatre. You can buy tickets here . 

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THE GREAT GATSBY

A graphic novel adaptation.

by F. Scott Fitzgerald & K. Woodman-Maynard ; illustrated by K. Woodman-Maynard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2021

A disappointing stand-in for the original.

Nearly a century after its first publication, the English class mainstay is presented in graphic form, presenting the story of Nick, a young man who rents a mansion in Long Island for the summer, and an enigmatic party host named Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s dialogue appears in speech bubbles while Nick’s signature nonjudgmental judgments are woven into the art itself, appearing in the beam of a lightbulb, the shadow of the self-important Tom Buchanan’s imposing frame, or the chaise that Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker seemingly ceaselessly lounge on. Woodman-Maynard’s adaptation of the text is understandably quite abridged, but it does the book no favors. The great revelation that Gatsby is (spoiler alert) not a trust fund kid but an imposter is afforded a single page, and the fact of his past affair with Daisy is so murkily depicted that it feels less tragic romance and more moony boy and Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The class issues that make the original novel so compelling are thus less than adequately examined. Where the book truly shines is in a few striking images, some metaphorical and some text based, rendered in cool, languid watercolor and digital art. As Woodman-Maynard indicates in the author’s note, those who are not familiar with the novel should begin there; those more familiar with the story will be able to fill in the gaps as they read this condensed version.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5362-1301-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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BOOK REVIEW

by F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Dave Page

by F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by James L.W. West III

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN

by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Gurihiru ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2020

A clever and timely conversation on reclaiming identity and acknowledging one’s full worth.

Superman confronts racism and learns to accept himself with the help of new friends.

In this graphic-novel adaptation of the 1940s storyline entitled “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” from The Adventures of Superman radio show, readers are reintroduced to the hero who regularly saves the day but is unsure of himself and his origins. The story also focuses on Roberta Lee, a young Chinese girl. She and her family have just moved from Chinatown to Metropolis proper, and mixed feelings abound. Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane’s colleague from the Daily Planet , takes a larger role here, befriending his new neighbors, the Lees. An altercation following racial slurs directed at Roberta’s brother after he joins the local baseball team escalates into an act of terrorism by the Klan of the Fiery Kross. What starts off as a run-of-the-mill superhero story then becomes a nuanced and personal exploration of the immigrant experience and blatant and internalized racism. Other main characters are White, but Black police inspector William Henderson fights his own battles against prejudice. Clean lines, less-saturated coloring, and character designs reminiscent of vintage comics help set the tone of this period piece while the varied panel cuts and action scenes give it a more modern sensibility. Cantonese dialogue is indicated through red speech bubbles; alien speech is in green.

Pub Date: May 12, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77950-421-0

Publisher: DC

Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by LeUyen Pham

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by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Les McClaine & Alison Acton ; color by Karina Edwards & Alex Campbell

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

by Kwame Alexander with Mary Rand Hess ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2017

A contemporary hero’s journey, brilliantly told.

The 17-year-old son of a troubled rock star is determined to find his own way in life and love.

On the verge of adulthood, Blade Morrison wants to leave his father’s bad-boy reputation for drug-and-alcohol–induced antics and his sister’s edgy lifestyle behind. The death of his mother 10 years ago left them all without an anchor. Named for the black superhero, Blade shares his family’s connection to music but resents the paparazzi that prevent him from having an open relationship with the girl that he loves. However, there is one secret even Blade is unaware of, and when his sister reveals the truth of his heritage during a bitter fight, Blade is stunned. When he finally gains some measure of equilibrium, he decides to investigate, embarking on a search that will lead him to a small, remote village in Ghana. Along the way, he meets people with a sense of purpose, especially Joy, a young Ghanaian who helps him despite her suspicions of Americans. This rich novel in verse is full of the music that forms its core. In addition to Alexander and co-author Hess’ skilled use of language, references to classic rock songs abound. Secondary characters add texture to the story: does his girlfriend have real feelings for Blade? Is there more to his father than his inability to stay clean and sober? At the center is Blade, fully realized and achingly real in his pain and confusion.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-310-76183-9

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Blink

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

More by Kwame Alexander

by Kwame Alexander

by Kwame Alexander & Deanna Nikaido ; illustrated by Melissa Sweet

by Kwame Alexander ; illustrated by Dare Coulter

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Reviews from Broadway and Beyond

The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald’s Classic, Impressively Staged, Once Again Defies Translation

By Roma Torre

★★★☆☆ Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada star in Paper Mill Playhouse’s Broadway-aimed musical

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has been an eternal source of fascination ever since it was published in 1925. It has been evoked numerous times on stage and screen. The latest incarnation is the musical, currently at the Paper Mill Playhouse, which is rumored to be Broadway-bound. It certainly has the look of a big Broadway-caliber production with magnificent sets, effects, costumes, choreography, and a bravura cast of major Broadway talents.

But as impressive as the production looks and sounds, it falls short of successfully translating Fitzgerald’s deeply dark themes concerning America’s obsession with wealth and class onto the stage. With its downbeat message of misplaced dreams and moral corruption, the novel seems to defy adaptation. This is a complex tale with no clear path to a cathartic or redemptive ending, and I have yet to see a winning version of Fitzgerald’s classic—aside from off-Broadway’s Elevator Repair Service production of Gatz , which spent six-plus hours featuring actors reading the entire novel cover to cover. The writing is so richly nuanced, it seems impossible to do it justice any other way.

The Paper Mill is putting on a game effort, principally with lead performers Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada, who are simply sensational as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. The two characters depict the hollow extravagances of the 1920s at the center of the novel and they are hopelessly flawed. Gatsby is a failed dreamer. The beautiful Daisy, as written, is superficial and materialistic.

As the story unfolds, the year is 1922. Gatsby has amassed a fortune in the hopes of winning over Daisy, with whom he had fallen in love five years earlier when he was a lowly army officer. World War I separated them and when it was over, Gatsby discovered Daisy has married and moved on.

The book is narrated by Daisy’s earnest cousin Nick Carraway, a young man who happens to move next door to Gatsby’s opulent Long Island mansion where wild parties are a nightly constant. Gatsby befriends Nick in an effort to reconnect with Daisy, who lives lavishly with her philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, and their young daughter right across the Sound. Gatsby deliberately placed his house in their direct line of view where he constantly sees a green light emitting from their dock. It’s a symbolic device representing the American Dream, which becomes unattainable even for him.

The musical’s book, written by Kait Kerrigan, is problematic. She does away with Nick’s narration and focuses on the Gatsby-Daisy love story. By dispensing with Nick’s narration, the story loses a valuable perspective—essentially the moral conscience that Fitzgerald amplified in the book. Without that, it’s a pretty straightforward love story about careless people who are hard to care about.

Kerrigan attempts to address that by depicting Daisy in a more sympathetically vulnerable light so we’re more invested in their relationship. By show’s end, Daisy does an about-face, reverting to the shallow character described by Nick in the book as “careless,” someone who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into [her] money.” Those final climactic scenes are muddled and unfortunately leave us cold.

The score, composed by Jason Howland with lyricist Nathan Tysen, is engagingly tuneful, featuring an eclectic mix of rousing jazz-age numbers and soulful ballads.

Noblezada, fresh from Hadestown and Miss Saigon , is three-for-three now with her powerful voice on that tiny frame. She’s proven herself a genuine star. Her 11 o’clock number—singing “The best thing a girl can be in this world is a beautiful little fool” (a line taken right out of the book)—offers one of the few emotionally engaging moments in the show.

Another is Jordan’s solo “Past Is Catching Up to Me.” Embodying the enigmatic Gatsby, Jordan plays the charismatic recluse to perfection. His act one finale with Noblezada, “My Green Light,” is beautifully rendered.

Every one of the leads is a standout. As Nick, Noah J. Ricketts is terrific; and paired with the excellent Samantha Pauly as the cynical, marriage-averse golf pro Jordan Baker, their courtship almost steals the show.

Representing the have-nots, Paul Whitty and Sara Chase as the tragic George and Myrtle Wilson are equally strong.

And John Zdrojeski, as the entitled chauvinistic brute Tom Buchanan, is a very convincing villain.

Staged efficiently by Marc Bruni, the two-and-a-half-hour production is fairly tight though it could benefit from some surgical cutting.

The tremendous sets and projections designed by Paul Tate dePoo III are truly impressive, along with Linda Cho’s costumes. An inspired touch is a dance number performed by the ensemble in open trench coats that whirl in cadence. Dominique Kelley’s choreography deserves kudos all around for its originality, merging the 1920s dances with the current century’s stylized movements.

It’s easy to see the appeal of adapting Gatsby onto the stage, especially now as we emerge from a pandemic echoing the Spanish influenza that plagued Fitzgerald’s era. And now get ready for a lot more productions, as the book has just entered the public domain (which means it can forever be produced without the need to pay royalties). There is, in fact, another Gatsby musical bound for Broadway helmed by Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin. The jury’s still out on that one. As for the Paper Mill production, I certainly wouldn’t count it out. Given all the talent involved, there is great promise—though I wouldn’t give it a green light just yet.

The Great Gatsby opened Oct. 22, 2023, at Paper Mill Playhouse and runs through Nov. 12. Tickets and information: papermill.org

About Roma Torre

Roma Torre’s dual career as a theater critic and television news anchor and reporter spans more than 30 years. A two-time Emmy winner, she’s been reviewing stage and film productions since 1987, starting at News 12 Long Island. In 1992, she moved to NY1, serving as both a news anchor and chief theater critic.

Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’ Is Now an Immersive Play—or Is It a Party?

“The Great Gatsby—The Immersive Show” is more party than profound examination of the text, but, experienced close-up with an excellent cast, its big moments still feel thrilling.

Senior Editor and Writer

Joan Marcus

Nick Carraway is seeking suggestions for the perfect seduction move.

“Glass of champagne,” one of these reporters replies in a far more panicked tone than they have ever considered a glass of champagne. A moment later, a little group of us are with Nick (Rob Brinkmann), Myrtle Wilson (Claire Saunders), and Tom Buchanan (Shahzeb Hussain), as the latter two cavort—both behind their married partners’ backs. Hussain has Buchanan’s brutal bluffness down pat. Our little group are laughing one minute, then mortified, then a little freaked out, and soon sworn to silence over what we have seen. And then it’s on to the next strange encounter.

Such is the world of Immersive Everywhere’s production of The Great Gatsby—The Immersive Show (booking to Dec. 3). Outside the Park Central Hotel on New York City’s Seventh Avenue, a few blocks south of Central Park, it is a steamy Saturday afternoon. Inside we are asked to line up on a red carpet, and then ushered downstairs into the “Gatsby Mansion,” as in Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s suave avatar for the Jazz Age . Some audience members are in their 2023 civvies, some are dressed up in full dapper, Flapper glory. Vanessa Leuck’s costumes for the performers are slick, spiffing, and sexy.

Around 16,000 square feet of unused ballroom space has been Gatsby-ishly made over by Shoko Kambara’s skilful art direction, production designer Casey Jay Andrews, decorator and prop supremos Faye Armon-Troncoso, Lauren Helpern, and Butter Designs, along with Jeff Croiter’s lighting (yes, that famous green light at the end of the dock is done very effectively). Big set pieces take place in a main ballroom space, with around its edges and darkened corridors—as in Sleep No More ‚ and other such enterprises—period-perfect furnished rooms where micro-dramas are played out for small groups of audience members.

The idea: Choose a Gatsby character or characters, choose an unfolding drama, and follow them. (In fact, the shepherding of the audience feels a little more formalized and orderly than other immersive productions.) Be prepared for characters to speak to you, and be ready to be asked to undertake tasks—some arduous, as in the young audience members who suddenly became floor sweepers to prepare for Gatsby’s (Joél Acosta) swoonily flirty afternoon tea with Daisy (Jillian Anne Abaya).

The New York Times reported that you would need to go to the show about 10 times to see it in its entirety—and it’s a two-and-a-half hour show. If you have the funds (it’s around $80 a ticket) and devotion to do so, good luck! The Daily Beast went once. Having sat through the masterfully executed experience of Gatz , these reporters were first struck—at least in the stories they followed, and what they observed in the main room—that the deeper strains and social-critique aspects of the book seemed to have been mostly jettisoned.

Despite the deaths and general tragedy that mount up towards the end, the vibe is P-A-R-T-Y , helped in no small way by a central bar characters dance on and audience members drink from (the bartenders deserve their own shoutout). Is the influence of Baz Luhrmann’s pizzazzy, propulsive movie present? Is that the Gatsby theater-going expectation?

There is lushly played era-specific music—the original score was composed and produced by Glen Andrew Brown and Tendai Humphrey Sitima, with arrangements and additional composition by David Sims—and whizzing choreography overseen by Holly Beasley-Garrigan, which you are encouraged to join in with. As the revelry ramps up at the beginning, we’re all waiting to catch a glimpse of the man himself, our fabulously wealthy and mysterious host, the elusive Gatsby.

The electricity between Abaya and Acosta is palpable, and the audience is quickly and deeply invested in their love story. By the time we get to Gatsby preparing for tea with Daisy—tying and retying his tie and freaking out about the flower arrangements—the audience is shouting helpful tips to him. (“Mr. Gatsby, the rug!” one spectator yelled with panic when the carpet bunched up under the tea table.)

We, too, want the long-awaited reunion between this ex-poor boy soldier and his society-girl muse to be perfect. He’s worked so hard and waited for so long, after all. He made something of himself against all odds—now he’s no longer just “some nobody” whom Daisy’s parents forbid her from marrying. He’s so successful he can buy those rubies and fine shirts and tiger skins, that mansion with the period bathrooms, those fine rare things, yet all poor substitutes for true love.

It’s all rewarded the moment their eyes meet. A hush falls on the room. Yes, she’s the green light and now he’s not just reaching for it across the bay, he’s arrived. But their happiness is short-lived, because he’s built his fortune by illicit means, and because Daisy is fickle, and because once you reach the green light, your count of enchanted objects in the world has “diminished by one.”

When Gatsby realizes this—in the claustrophobic and booze-soaked apartment where he and Nick and Tom and Jordan and Daisy sweat away a sweltering summer night—and he absorbs that Daisy is not going to tell her boorish husband that she never loved him, that perhaps she even forget about Gatsby for a time—even as he had decked out his love for her with “fire and freshness,” with every “bright feather that drifted his way”—he panics, Daisy retreats, and the wheels of tragedy are set in motion as the quintet rush back to their mansions through the Valley of Ashes.

Alexander Wright, who adapted and directed the production, insisted to the Times that Gatsby’s narrative darkness was very much intact: “Come for the party. Stay for the social tragedy,” is his motto. Despite the stark finale, an immersive show is, by its very nature, an extended jape, with audience members being conveyed through a series of tableaux that—even if it’s an argument, or a confrontation—carry a different tone because you are not sitting separate from the stage, watching characters from afar. You are in the thick of the action, and the surreal frisson of that intimacy can dilute rather than accentuate the seriousness of what may be dramatically intended.

The production appears to know this. The big set-pieces of “Gatsby” unfold in the main room, in the most conventional way as you would watch them unfold in traditional theater. And, unlike Sleep No More , this doesn’t just happen as a crescendo at the end, but regularly throughout the performance.

The company is excellent, seemingly delighting in the collisions of fiction and performer-meet-audience reality they must marshal themselves and us through. Acosta has Gatsby’s smooth charm and sinister remove, Brinkmann Carraway’s brisk sweetness—and he interacts in a very inclusive, kind way with the audience, shrugging and apologizing at all the craziness they find themselves caught up in. Abaya plays Daisy as the archetypal good time girl painfully aware of the thin ice beneath her whirling heels. This critic didn’t see much of Stephanie Rocío’s Jordan Baker, but she sung up a storm. Keivon Akbari as George Wilson spirited a group of four of us away to help us compose a song for Myrtle, and then help him sing it (and very melodiously we carried it off too, if I may say).

Near the end, both of us reporters were stapled to the main room, having come to feel the little rooms—one where one of us had just spent a patch of time with the charming but slippery Meyer Wolfsheim (Charlie Marcus)—were adding padding but not vitality to the main story, which kept blooming into merry and then tragic life in the main room.

Going back nine further times would yield other revelations, and perhaps darker dramas, in other rooms. But what to do if, like us, you are just going once? Well, judging not just by the book, but also the flurries of drama on the floor, our perhaps predictable recommendation would be to try and stick close to Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy. This won’t always be possible, as you may find yourself in a clutch of people suddenly dragooned somewhere else, but once you identify those characters, sidle over to them.

Did we learn anything new about The Great Gatsby ? No, not in the way that Gatz’ s full recitation so stunningly opened up Fitzgerald’s text. This immersive experience is more revelry-minded, although when the world of Gatsby and the Buchanans falls apart—and the main stage is suddenly illuminated by shafts of funereal light, and Gatsby himself appears in a fateful bathing suit—it rightly slows and leans into its foundational profundity.

The play nails the Roaring 20s feel so well—manic, frenzied, youthful, precarious—that you can’t help but enjoy yourself even if you know it’s all going to come crashing to an end very soon. As the novel and the play remind us, you can’t turn back time, you can’t recapture certain youthful dreams—today’s audience can’t go back to pre-COVID innocence—and yet it certainly feels good to dance amongst strangers once again and watch the smartly-dressed Gatsby woo his beloved Daisy. So good, in fact, that we forget for a time that we’re all driving on “toward death through the cooling twilight.”

The Light in the Piazza

Encores has done it again. After Into the Woods and Parade , their stunning, shattering revival of The Light in the Piazza must, must, must go to Broadway, principally because Ruthie Ann Miles has to shine for more than a span of five nights as Margaret Johnson, mother to Clara (Anna Navelson, just as fabulous). In Craig Lucas’ intelligent, deeply felt musical, with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, mother and daughter are in Florence, where Clara falls for Fabrizio Naccarelli (James D. Gish). But a secret medical condition could torpedo their romance.

Anna Zavelson, left, and Ruthie Ann Miles in 'The Light in the Piazza.'

The story outline does not do justice to what explodes so vividly on stage—in terms of the terrain of the relationships sketched, the singing by the principals, and also a range of nuanced, delicate, witty, and moving performances under Chay Yew’s sensitive direction. Miles balances dry wit with a profound protectiveness, and finally determination to embrace romance and possibility—everything that her own marriage to husband Roy (Michael Hayden) has up to now nullified. The very funny Andréa Burns as Fabrizio’s mother supplies the most pointedly timely Italian translation on stage.

What really resonates are the unexpected, enveloping folds of the story. The joys and misery of mother and daughter, translated into soaring soprano—with Rob Berman directing a shimmeringly perfect Encores! Orchestra—left our audience elated, poleaxed, and still cheering and applauding as we headed to the exits. Put simply, to any Broadway theaters reading this: Sunday’s must not be the final performance of The Light in the Piazza .

Back and Forth

This is a lovely, uniquely New York experience, and also a mournful way to drink in a summer eve’s sunset. To see Back and Forth (Central Park, East Meadow, Fifth Avenue and 98th Street, to July 23), you sit on some grass with a pocket radio and headphones. In front of you, 100 feet away, Marty (Richard Hollman, who also wrote the play) prepares to play a game of catch in Central Park with his best friend Drew (Chris Roberti), with a baseball and two mitts.

Richard Hollman, facing camera, and Chris Roberti in 'Back and Forth.'

Ashley Garrett

We can hear what they are saying to each other via our pocket radios, and what unfolds over 45 minutes is a friendship in gentle, then sudden, though perhaps not deathly freefall. Part of it is down to the pandemic, and lives quietly diverging. Part of it is down to growing up and growing away from one another, as life commitments with significant others take precedent. They also joke and provoke one another, and generally kvetch as two New York buddies do, which makes the punch of their actual farewell even more winding.

The trajectory of their goodbye is mirrored—under Katie Young’s direction—with how their throwing to each other segues from long, deep, smooth throws to ones slung with more venom and anger. Around the men and walking between them—not realizing they are participating in a theater production, likely just seeing another two guys playing a game of catch—are real people on their own or in groups, with dogs, kids and playing their own games of ball. In the quietest way imaginable, the ending almost aces this season’s memorable stage exits of Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House and Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford’s in Sweeney Todd .

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