Fatherhood, it turns out, puts a big dent in your reading time.
As I’m sure that Ready or Not, Mr Croc doesn’t count towards the 26 I decided to rattle through a couple of books I’ve had in the pile for some time, the first being the Great Gatsby. I’ve been rattling considerably more slowly than I had expected.
One of the reasons for slow rattling has been that I disliked the Great Gatsby so much. Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have I loathed the central characters of a book as much as this.
I don’t think it’s really the fault of the narrative. It’s lively and wittily written but there’s something about books featuring little cliques of rich people living out their privileged lives and being terribly worried about things that are only important within their own circle that makes my boil with rage. I want to throw the book across the room. This, I realise, is entirely my own problem.
The plot concerns a young man making friends with people from outside his own class, people who appear to be carefree, rich and socially exotic. It’s about a love affair with the idea of privilege and effortless wealth, ultimately brought down by the grubby origins of fortunes, selfishness, obsessive romance and passionate death. It’s a big story told admirably well from a small, tight perspective and depends entirely on the humanity and failings of its characters. As the end neared I was rooting for the gunman.
Before I’d finished the book, it was suggested to me as I was ranting about how much I hated them all that maybe I was meant to – that Fitzgerald might have been satirising the empty lives of the American upper classes – but I don’t think he really was. At least not consciously. Accounts of his life tell of high society parties and hob-nobbing in New York state, all the sort of thing that fills the pages of his novel.
Considering the ultimately bleak tone of the novel, though, I can’t help inferring that Fitzgerald hated himself, his peers, his family and the world he lived in, and I can’t work out whether this is an extraordinary flash of insight on my part of just a symptom of the big class-hatred chip on my shoulder. I suspect it’s the latter.
So: a fine book, but I just couldn’t enjoy it. Too bad for me.
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