It’s one thing to be taught about modernism. You sit in high school English class and dutifully take notes: “Modernist literature was a break from the realism of the past and a movement towards symbolism and stream-of-consciousness, and a relaxation of previously-inviolate social conventions. [Scribbled unflattering caricature of teacher] [Anarchy symbol].”
It’s another thing to slog through eleven pre-20th century classics and then be confronted with unrepentant boozing, fucking and swearing — and that’s just the women. It’s weird to say, but I was almost offended by this book.
Of course Lady Chatterley is no Jane Eyre, either, but Chatterley is expressly about the war between the old and the new, set amidst the same indolent English gentry I recognized from the previous three hundred fictional years. In Gatsby, the new has been solidly victorious, and the characters naively assume that both the culture war and the world war is a thing of the past.
Once I got over my classics-induced prissiness (gay sex, for shame!), I really enjoyed the novel. It’s the only one I can truly say that about — where every page was simply enjoyable (as much as is possible when everyone in the book is broken and miserable). Part of it was that it’s so American. Henry James was my only other American author, but his book is set in Europe and populated largely by Europeans. Everyone in Gatsby talks like people I know, except that nobody I know says “old sport.” I guess that’s Jazz Age for “dawg.”
I didn’t watch the 1974 film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, because those people are too famous to ever believe as characters from a novel. Plus by now I had moved on to the 2006 book list, which meant three unbelievably painful months of Tristram Shandy, the book that no one but me has ever read.