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The Great Gatsby
548 pages
A glittering, champagne-soaked tragedy about the hollow pursuit of an impossible past.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like attending a spectacular, feverish party where the champagne flows freely but everyone is secretly miserable. The prose is famously lyrical and intoxicating, wrapping sharp social critique in sentences so beautiful they demand to be read aloud. It moves at a brisk, glittering pace through a sweltering New York summer, building a mood that is simultaneously opulent and deeply melancholic. You are guided by an observant, slightly cynical narrator who watches the wealthy destroy themselves and others with careless abandon. It is a perfect read for those who love gorgeous, atmospheric writing and stories that peel back the glamorous veneer of high society to reveal the tragic, hollow illusions of the American Dream beneath.
- Mood
- glamorous
- melancholic
- feverish
- hollow
- opulent
- Tone
- cynical
- elegiac
- ironic
- wistful
- observational
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the illusion of the American Dream · corrosive wealth · unrequited obsession · the passage of time · reinvention and identity
- The writing
- Lyrical, highly polished, and deeply evocative, characterized by poetic metaphors and a rhythmic, almost musical cadence.
- The arc
- Begins with glittering, champagne-soaked curiosity and slowly descends into a sobering, tragic realization of hollow illusions.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate gorgeous, atmospheric prose and sharp social critiques wrapped in the glittering tragedy of the Jazz Age.
Content notes
- infidelity
- domestic abuse
- vehicular manslaughter
- murder
- suicide
- alcoholism
About the book
Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts.
"There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.... It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."
It is the story of this Jay Gatsby who came so mysteriously to West Egg, of his sumptuous entertainments, and of his love for Daisy Buchanan – a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism, and is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe.
It is a magical, living book, blended of irony, romance, and mysticism.
\--first edition jacket
Description from Open Library.
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