Just Finished Reading (Again) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Forty-two years is a considerable span of time between two readings of the same book...but since I've only read the overwhelming majority of books in my lifetime just one time, that still says something.  I first read The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald, in the fall of 1972 in my high school eleventh-grade English class...and then proceeded to write a research paper about it, a rush job that regrettably garnered me a poor grade and didn't reflect the fact that I had liked the book.  But I shouldn't hold that against either Fitzgerald or that English teacher, although the latter in retrospect did a lousy job of teaching (as, sad to say, did most of my high school teachers).  This novel, set in the early 1920s in New York's Long Island during the early years of the Prohibition Era (which lasted from 1919 to 1933), painted a time picture of an America that was struggling with its identity following a trying world war and the promise of prosperity with the advent of mass production.  Organized crime, both in regard to gambling (the fixing of the 1919 World Series in baseball is mentioned) and alcohol smuggling and distribution was on the rapid rise.  There also was a cultural clash of sorts between the nouveau riche, those people who made their wealth rapidly (legitimately or not) from the middle and lower classes and those from the traditionally upper classes with their own sense of inherited entitlement and superiority...

The Great Gatsby is told in the first person by the character Nick Carraway, a young bonds trader who has just moved east to Long Island and, in his relatively modest home, finds himself living next door to a mansion in which a mysterious young man, Jay Gatsby, resides.  Gatsby is continually throwing parties at his house, and eventually Carraway is invited to attend one...at which he meets his host in person and strikes up a friendship.  In the meantime, Nick has met back up with a distant cousin named Daisy, who is married to a brutish, bigoted, and snobbish dude named Tom Buchanan (as you might guess, a thoroughly unlikable character).  When Gatsby hears of Daisy, the circle is closed, for as it turns out, they had been lovers just before he was to sent off as a soldier in World War I...but their respective disparity of social standing kept them from marrying each other.  Daisy instead, brought up in money, married Tom, another "well-to-do", while Gatsby, following the war, got rich quick...with the implication that he was involved with organized crime on some level.  So, as readers, we find ourselves dealing with this triangle of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom...plus Tom's mistress Myrtle and her estranged husband George.  And now it's up to the author to mix circumstances together in such an improbable manner as to brew up an ending which bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I still liked the story, Jay Gatsby's constant and thoroughly annoying use of the saying "Old Sport" notwithstanding. But the novel's outcome does depend on an incredibly unlikely chain of events...it would have been better had things gone down in a more believable manner.  Still, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us an incisive look at America in the early 1920s as the growing decadence of its culture combined with its economic optimism and growing mass consumerism...and the accompanying tendency to dispose of anything, including people, that might interfere with one's lifestyle or plans...