i mentioned the great gatsby last time i posted, and i just wanted to qualify that mention, apropos of nothing but my own desire to make myself clear.
i really do think that bret easton ellis is an important writer, able to hang, on a literary-historical scale, with just about anyone out there right now, and i’ll come back to him another time, but just because he riffed well on the great gatsby doesn’t mean he gets to hang with fitzgerald.
the only other time i mentioned gatsby on this site, i hinted that i didn’t really like it when i first read it (11th grade). i didn’t like it because it was presented to me as a book about the jazz age (which i would have been cool with), and it was clear just about immediately that it wasn’t.
i first read crime and punishment when i was in 10th grade, and i loved it. for a while it was my favorite novel. some time later, say, 12th grade, i decided i had outgrown it, that it was for kids. then, when it was assigned to me in college, i realized i had been wrong about outgrowing it.
i think that was because of the pevear/volokhonsky translation. when you read that translation, you realize that dostoyevsky was a great stylist, and that what, in the garnett translation, came across as adolescent wallowing, is actually an uncanny combination of expressionism and irony. meaning, yes, dostoyevsky made raskolnikov wallow, but he also knew exactly what he was doing and how it looked.
we don’t get much of that these days (which is why bolano was such a revelation — though i wonder how many people realize that was why bolano was such a revelation).
anyway, gatsby — it was clearly written by someone familiar with the ethos of the jazz age, but what was interesting about it when i returned to it as a grownup was how clearly fitzgerald used his scenesterism to brush the scene off. he spends the entire book writing around the real issue (though, thankfully, not like henry james did), in much the same way bolano would in his best stuff (for me, so far, 2666 and distant star) (though the last line of by night in chile, and the way it reflects back on the book, would have been enough to make him a classic in my eyes).
this is interesting, because i was deep into kierkegaard when i first read gatsby, and gatsby illustrates kierkegaard’s approach to indirect communication.
i guess i just wasn’t ready to get it.
anyway, i think fitzgerald was probably a big influence on bolano, and we probably also wouldn’t have gary lutz’s work or denis johnson’s jesus’ son without it.
let me stop being so abstract.
f. scott fitzgerald
here is a line from a climactic argument scene, one that i think any of the writers i mentioned above would be jealous of:
The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.
there are syntactical quirks here that work in context (how does an argument herd people?) (why does he try to make the racing of the beads function as part of a compund predicate instead of just putting a comma after “legs”?), but obviously it’s the simple fact that, in the middle of the big drama, nick carraway is fixated on his butt sweat that makes it so good.
of course, this would have been considered a dodge in workshop, which is why i often read those anti-workshop rants by people who couldn’t get into workshops with a little bit of glee (though the rants are never good).
but the reason i think the line is so good, and why i think some of my favorite writers would like to have written it, is because it’s true from nick carraway’s perspective in a way that a cool party with hepcats could never be.
okay, then here is a little bit of dialog that denis johnson would have liked to write, just in case you didn’t think the above example applied to him:
“Did you have a nice ride?”
“Very good roads around here.”
“I supose the autombiles–”
“Yeah.”
finally, gatsby serves as a reminder that all us americans are wrong about books these days — it hasn’t always been about size (in fact, aside from moby dick, try naming a canonical american meganovel before 1930) (don’t say dreiser, herb, or else you’ll have said dreiser) (or howells or james) (i’m trying to keep you from embarrassing yourself). fitzgerald famously sweated joyce. but think about it — if he had written like joyce, he might have written a piece of shit like ulysses.
more short novels, y’all. preferably as good as gatsby.
