Gatsby

Kathryn Schulz at New York on America's Gatsby obsession Everyone has read The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel that gets its newest interpretation this Friday. But is the novel still any good? Gatsby "is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere ­intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience," writes Kathryn Schulz, who continues: "I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains." Fitzgerald fails to engage with any kind of moral complexity, she argues, referring to the novel's famous last line: "In the moral universe of The Great Gatsby, we are not all in the same boat. We are all up above it, watching—with prurient fascination, with pious opprobrium, watching and watching and doing nothing at all." Zachary M. Seward at Quartz took a different tack, arguing that we've forgotten what The Great Gatsby was actually about — "the hollow, rotting underbelly of class and capital in the early 1920s." He writes: "Many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town. They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of galas in Manhattan. Just the other day, vacation rental startup Airbnb sent out invitations to a 'Gatsby-inspired soiree' at a multi-million-dollar home on Long Island, seemingly oblivious to the novel’s undertones. It’s like throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party."