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This podcast is supported by FX's Dying for Sex. Starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate. This series follows Molly, who after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, decides to leave her husband to explore the full breadth of her sexual desires. She gets the courage and support to go on this adventure from her best friend Nikki, who stays by her side through it all. FX's Dying for Sex. All episodes now streaming on Hulu.
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. It's April, and this month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel about America, the Roaring Twenties, New York City, wealth, class, love, tragedy, and one very powerful green light.
Joining me this week is A.O. Scott, a critic at large here at The Book Review. Tony, as we call him in-house, recently wrote a piece looking at the evolution of Gatsby over those 100 years, as well as its many incarnations in culture, both high and low. Tony, welcome back. Great to be here, Gilbert. Thank you.
For those of you who don't remember everything that happens in The Great Gatsby, because it's been a while since you've read it, I'm going to start, Tony, if that's okay, by quoting a piece that is not written by you, one that is written by your colleague, our colleague, Parle Sagal, who wrote about The Great Gatsby in 2020, right when the book's copyright was about to expire. So this is how she describes the plot. Quote,
You recall Nick Carraway, our narrator, who moves next door to the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby on Long Island. Gatsby, it turns out, is pining for Nick's cousin Daisy. His glittering life is a lure to impress her, to win her back.
Daisy is inconveniently married to the brutish Tom Buchanan, who in turn is carrying on with a married woman, the doomed Myrtle. Cue the parties, the affairs, Nick getting very queasy about it all. In a lurid climax, Myrtle is run over by a car driven by Daisy. Gatsby's blamed. Myrtle's husband shoots him dead in his pool and kills himself. And then the Buchanans discreetly leave town, their hands clean. Nick is writing this book, we understand years later.
In a frenzy of disgust. I always forget that last part, Tony, that he's writing a book. That he's writing a book about this all.
Yes, there is that kind of extra layer of his perspective. And he often disappears. It's interesting. We think a lot, the vivid characters that we think about in this book are Daisy and Gatsby and Tom, and Nick is this sort of wallflower. And yet it is his perspective, it's his point of view that colors and influences everything that we see about the others.
Now, Tony, I just talked about the plot of the book. That's what happens. What would you say it's about? This is a really interesting question because I think one of the reasons that it's lasted as long as it has and has in so many different eras meant so many different things to so many different readers is that even though it's a quite short book,
book, it seems to be about a lot of different things. It's about the United States in the 1920s, an era of great prosperity, an era that came after a devastating war and a devastating pandemic in which a lot of, it felt that a lot of the traditional constraints and traditions were falling by the wayside and there was new money and new morals and anything went.
It's partly about that. It's partly a kind of critical and satirical view of America in the 20s. But it's also about American life more generally and about, in particular, I think, what it means to be on the inside or the outside of American life. So the thing about Jay Gatsby is he's, as we know, or spoiler alert or whatever, he's not actually, Jay Gatsby is not his name. His name is James Gatz. And he's a very mysterious figure.
The source of his money and the facts about his previous life and his background are somewhat mysterious, and it's revealed that he has connections to bootlegging and to gangsters and is in this old-moneyed enclave of Long Island amid a version of New York culture.
high society. And the question is, who is he? Where does he belong? And therefore, who belongs? What does it mean to be an outsider or to belong in American society? And what are the values or the kind of the anchoring facts of identity in this country? And I think it's the most
intriguing and subtle and somewhat enigmatic aspect of the novel is that is what Fitzgerald thinks about that, about class, about identity, also about race and ethnicity and how they factor into the question of who's American. Tony, I've read The Great Gatsby genuinely 15, 20 times. It helps that it's fairly short and beautifully written. I'm curious when you first recall reading Fitzgerald's book.
I read it for the first time in a high school English class, which I think is true of a lot of people. I don't know if you did. Certainly did. Certainly did. Yeah. And because it's a very teachable book, there's themes in it. You can write about the symbolism of the green light at the end of the dock.
You can write about the last sentence, so we beat on boats against the current drawn ceaselessly back into the past. What does that mean? There's a lot that's accessible for students and for student term papers. As you say, it's a short book and not a very difficult book, although in its way, a very complex book.
I read it then and liked it anyway, even though I had read it in school, which is not always a guarantee of responding to or liking a book. I was quite taken with it and read a lot more Fitzgerald. And then I've read it again periodically. I certainly read it when I was in graduate school studying American literature. It was an important thing to study in the development of the modern American literature.
novel and literature of the 1920s. Then, yeah, I've kept coming back to it. It is a very accessible, very readable, very entertaining book, but it's also one of those books, there's always something new in it. There's always a new angle that you discover. There's a new place where your attention lands.
a different character, a different scene, a different theme. You notice things about the language. It's this very kind of lyrical, but also very sharp and satirical style that he writes in. So there's always something there to come back to.
Now, without just reciting your entire piece, which is a wonderful read and it's wonderful to look at for any listeners who haven't had a moment to check it out, look for A.O. Scott's piece on Gatsby at 100. I'm curious how you approached telling the history and the modern resonances of a book that's very well known.
That was one of the things that I was thinking about was how to approach it, because I thought it'd be interesting to do something at the centennial. It's 100 years, and here's this book.
that still has a claim on our attention, that's still fresh in a way. But I wasn't at first sure what to do because there have been a lot of essays. Every few years, someone writes an essay, either The Great Gatsby is overrated or The Great Gatsby is misunderstood. That's sort of taking, trying to fix on what is the essence of the book? What's the real truth of The Great Gatsby? What's the right way to read it? And I found I was more interested in the history of how people had read it.
And just thinking about the different film adaptations that had been made, thinking about the Robert Redford version and then the Leo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann version, and then all kinds of curious facts about the book. It was not a well-reviewed or a particularly commercially successful book when it started. And then it had a comeback. And
And as I went through looking for its different manifestations in popular culture, I found some really interesting things that I didn't know were there, like that Charles Schultz of Peanuts had done some strips that were sort of about Gatsby, where he had Snoopy as Gatsby.
which I thought was really charming and strange. And there's a Simpsons episode from a few years back called The Great Fatsby with a PH, which is this kind of a hip-hop retelling of Gatsby. So I was looking around, not necessarily at the book itself, but at its...
It's history, it's reception, it's reputation, it's the way it had been adapted into popular culture. There was, of course, Gats, the staged reading of the whole play, which is an amazing theater experience and a kind of improbable one. You could have some people just on a stage reading a book.
for seven hours, and it would be the most electrifying thing that you'd ever seen in the theater. So I just thought, how could you tell this story without writing a whole book, another one about The Great Gatsby, in a way that you could just get some of the flavor of what this has been, of the different things that this book and this character have been? I'd love for you to talk about how the book was, as you say, received initially, and then how it came to
to sort of be absorbed into the bloodstream of American literary culture. Fitzgerald was a well-known author, as you write, when he published The Great Gatsby, had a couple hit books under his belt, and this one did not do as well. No, this one did not do as well. The reviews were lukewarm, but, and he was, yes, he was a best-selling author. He was already anointed as the voice of his generation. He was quite young. He was still in his 20s, and this was his third novel.
And it was seen as a misfire and also as something that, this is one of the great ironies, that would date. That was too much about what was happening right then and didn't really have any kind of staying power. So one of the reviewers said, it's really, I think in the New York Herald maybe, said, this is a book for this season only. And that was one of the kind of reviews. Some of them just thought it was a dud, it was boring, they didn't know what it was about.
And it was immediately adapted into a film, which is now Lost. But it didn't really sell very well. And it was maybe the beginning of Fitzgerald's decline. And he'd been a very fashionable novelist of the 20s. And by the 1930s, he had gone out to Hollywood. His career as a novelist stumbled, even though he wrote after Gatsby, I think, what is actually his masterpiece, Tender is the Night. Whoa, whoa. But...
I think so. That's the one I really love. We'll do a bonus pod where we talk about tenders tonight.
But anyway, he was by the time he died, prematurely and tragically, he was more or less forgotten. He was a has-been. And the book was forgotten, too, in the 1930s. It makes me think of Moby Dick, almost. It's like that. I mean, Moby Dick had a longer obscurity, but that was true, too, that Melville was a best-selling author before Moby Dick. And then Moby Dick was published to just really hostile reviews. One of them was headlined Herman Melville Crazy.
And that was the end of it. And he ended up, he lived a much longer time after that and ended up working at a customs house in New York. But we'll do another episode
podcast about Robyn Dick. Right. But that was another book that was not appreciated in his time. And then a very long time later, it's considered to be one of the greats. And revived. And it's always fascinating how those revivals happen, how a book goes from obscurity to just a sort of canonical status. And
The thing that happened with Gatsby was World War II. There were, for some reason, it was one of the books that was published in a U.S. Armed Forces paperback edition that was given to American soldiers as they went off into combat. They would get a pack of camels and some condoms and a copy of The Great Gatsby. And a lot of them read it then. Like 150,000 of those were printed. And
By the end of the war, it had started to come back and
There were also a number of critics who wrote, including Lionel Trilling, who was on his way to becoming maybe the academic critic of certainly of the modern novel in the post-war era. And he wrote an essay about Gatsby that was the introduction to a reissue. So it started humming into the Academy and also started to get the attention of general readers. One of the people who may have read it
in an Armed Forces edition was J.D. Salinger, who served with the U.S. Army during World War II and who
puts it in a few of his books. It's the book that Holden Caulfield talks about. So maybe the only book that Holden Caulfield and Catcher in the Rye kind of talks about with reverence is a book that his, the older brother that he worshipped got him to read. So in the- There's a parallel, it feels like, between the narrators of those two books. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think what happened was, which is what is fascinating. I mean, you're talking about how the book
changes is that in the 40s and 50s, it was not a satire of America in the 1920s, but became a much more general study of what they like to call in that era, in that post-war era, the predicament of modern man. So Gatsby became a kind of an alienated, a tragic figure, not as the victim of a cruel class society, which may be how he might have looked in the 20s or how he might look
Now, but more as a sort of the malaise of modern life, as a figure like Holden Caulfield or like Meursault in Camus' The Stranger or like the characters in the early Saul Bellow novel, someone who is...
fundamentally alienated at odds with modern life and becomes an archetype of a certain kind of modern personality. So that, in my piece, I call that existential Gatsby. And that is what brings really the novel to the center of attention in the 40s and 50s, what kind of injects it into college and then high school curricula that gets
prominent critics writing about it and elevating Fitzgerald, as Trilling did, up to a level with Dostoevsky or with Kafka. Now, you make a brief point in your piece that sometimes when a book achieves that level and it's just taught over and over again in school, it can take on the reputation of this is a classic and you must read it. Therefore, maybe it is boring and you never want to read it again. I've never found that, however, with this book.
No, it's really, it's not true with this book. Sometimes, weirdly, the book is caricatured that way. There's this famous Andy Kaufman routine that he used to do. He did it on Saturday Night Live and he did it in some of his shows in the 70s and 80s. The great kind of alienating, provocative comedian and the whole thing about his jokes is that you never knew whether they were jokes or not. And he had a whole thing where he would get up in front of the audience and say, okay, I'm going to read you a book.
And he would come out in a bow tie and tails, doing a funny highbrow voice, and start to read The Great Gatsby and continue to read it. And the idea was, this is the most unentertaining thing you could imagine. And that was actually that...
performance was the genesis of Gats. And Gats, the stage show, is exactly that and turns out to be an exciting, thrilling, and inventive work of theater. So Gatsby is high, low, and in between. It's never boring, but also it becomes, especially in the 80s and 90s and now, whatever you want it to be. If you want to talk about people, talk about the
The parties. There's a recent Saturday Night Live sketch where it's, oh, we're going to have a Gatsby party. It's a wild party. People wearing newsboy caps or cloche hats or flapper dresses. So it's just this kind of signifier for excess and decadence and wild parties, but also it's
tragedy and alienation and there's the love story in the middle of it. There's a romantic element. It's everything to everybody. It's a Rorschach book.
I do think you're right, that it is part of the reason that it's taught in high school is because you can teach history through it sometimes. Or you can talk about themes. You can talk about symbolism. As you say, here is the green light. Here are the eyes of Dr. T.J. Echelberg. What does this mean? Are these the eyes of God? It also...
has a way I feel like in which it has through its films primarily become misinterpreted as a love story where the romance really does take one of the central roles where whether it comes through in the movies, it definitely comes through in the book, which is like these people are so dumb-dumbs and this love that they think that they have is based on nothing. Gossamer thin nostalgia of a wonderful week that they had together in Louisville.
Yeah, exactly. And you sort of wonder what exactly is Gatsby's plan? Yeah, this is good. What is his plan? There was this girl and then you went away to war and then you decided what? That you would make all this money in the underworld as a bootlegger and then move across the basically across the street. And then coincidentally wait for her death.
cousin to move in next door. The greatest coincidence in American literature. And that would be your entree. And this is one of the things that I kind of love about the novel, and that's what's fascinating about Fitzgerald, is he has, on the one hand, a very astute
social observer. Just the way that he writes about Tom and Daisy Buchanan is so dead on and so just revealing of class and racial prejudice, of this kind of carelessness and destructiveness of the rich. And yet, at the same time, there is this fairy tale, swoony, lyrical corniness in it too. And that mixture, I think, is one of the things that makes it so intriguing. Because if you're an adolescent...
You can read it for all of that kind of pop swooniness. On the other hand, if you're a high school English teacher, you can read it with, OK, kids, we're going to learn about metaphor and symbolism and the mythology of the American dream. So you can have it all. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.
This podcast is supported by FX's Dying for Sex. Starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate. This series follows Molly, who after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, decides to leave her husband to explore the full breadth of her sexual desires.
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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined by A.O. Scott, Tony Scott, who's here to talk about The Great Gatsby on its 100th anniversary.
The language in some of the sections of the book is beautiful and lyrical. And then there are sections of the book where it is incredibly overheated, but also beautiful and lyrical in its own way. There's this one part where Gatsby is remembering five years prior where he and Daisy are walking down the street and he says...
Out of the corner of his eye, Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees. He could climb to it if he climbed alone. And once there, he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder, which is beautiful, but also ridiculous. The funny thing is, on the next page, Nick says, through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality,
And so there's also a sense, whether it's Fitzgerald or the narrator...
All these things that Gatsby is saying and his incredible capacity for hope is also ridiculous. And that's one of the touching things about the character, because at the end, there's the really kind of heart-rending encounter with his father. Absolutely. And who shows that, like, as a young boy, he wrote down goals and in this very sort of Horatio Alger, Ben Franklin way, program of self-improvement.
Wake up early, practice elocution, save $5, crossed out, save $3. But part of the pathos of that is that is a kid in humble circumstances imagining how it is that you climb. And one of the things that happens to him is that he discovers that when you do climb, the people who you meet up there will look at you sometimes with fascination, but also...
With contempt. And we'll think you are sentimental. Because part of the way that Tom and Daisy and also Nick are is that this world, they're entitled to it. It belongs to them, and they belong in it. And the kind of language that you point out there is evidence of...
How Gatsby still doesn't fit, how he's still always going to be on the wrong foot, is always going to be judged as an outsider, even if these people will come to his house and drink his champagne and associate with him.
I would love to talk about, since I'm an erstwhile film critic here, some of the adaptations. As you say, there have been four feature films. There was a silent version that was released in 1926, I believe, that's been lost to time. There was a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby with Shelley Winters.
as Myrtle. I just, I watched the trailer a few minutes before this. And a completely rewritten story because the production code, it's just preposterous. It won't get into just how it entirely changes everything that happens. Oh, I'm very curious now. I've never seen it. It's not a good movie. There was a 1974 version starring Robert Redford, screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, Mia Farrow,
as Daisy that I saw for some reason so many times as a teenager. And then a 2013 version starring Leo DiCaprio directed by Baz Luhrmann in the maximalist Baz Luhrmann style. I really like that one. The 1974 version feels very remote and becalmed and just almost watching it through a haze. And there's, I think, a kind of reverence for the literary source that can sometimes be trouble. Whereas this
Baz Luhrmann is very interested in the story as a story about materialism, about glamour, about romance and passion, as he often does when he takes these older stories. He thinks about what connects this to the popular culture of right now. And I think having Jay-Z as executive producer for the soundtrack and having the soundtrack that layers in all kinds of hip hop and pop on top of the sort of the
the jazz age jazz was a very shrewd insight and brought the story into the 21st century in a way that I found very exciting and very credible. It's not exactly what Fitzgerald would have done, but it seemed to me a kind of a serious and pretty inspired reading of the book. I am curious how you think focus on Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio, like
How they play Gatsby and more germane to the book itself, what it says about this character that is an enigma in some ways to everyone around him. It is really fascinating to compare them because they're the two big movie stars of their moment. In a way, there's no one bigger than either one of them at that moment. And...
They're also very different kinds of actors. Redford is so recessive, so quiet, Protestant in a way. And there's this sort of, just this kind of melancholy that suffuses the character. And
of the melancholy is there with DiCaprio's performance. But what DiCaprio, and I wrote something about this at the time, DiCaprio at that moment in like 2013, around then, he'd been in Wolf of Wall Street and he was in Gatsby. And between those two roles, it's like he
He was the embodiment of a certain idea of capitalism and of the energy and the excess and the ambition and the destructiveness of a certain kind of drive to make money. And I think he's also, the thing about DiCaprio also is that however old he gets, there's still something boyish about him. He's still like a kid. Right.
So there was that kind of tenderness at the same time, that sort of almost naive innocence. So that, yeah, that you could imagine him as maybe you couldn't imagine Redford as exactly that young Gatsby thinking that the sidewalk was the ladder to the tree where you could suck the pap of life.
That famous line we all remember. Yes, I remember. But you could also believe him as the guy who has 500 handmade, exquisite, beautiful shirts. And that's like the most, that's the most sensuous scene in the whole movie is when DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan are in that room full of his shirts. I'm curious, to me, they're, and again, I've read this book so many times, there are so many...
memorable scenes. There's so many memorable side characters, almost, and there's so many memorable quotes. And I'm wondering, in any of those categories, if you might...
if anything comes to mind, is something that always sticks out to you. There's the whole, the scene, the party in Manhattan, which is when, where Tom Buchanan really reveals himself. He's such an interesting and revealing villain in a way. And he's obsessed with the sort of racial pseudoscience of the time. And he's,
talking about a book by someone who he identifies as Stoddard, but it's really a book by Madison Grant called, I think, The Decline of a Great Race, which is about how the white European world is being overrun by all of these other races, implying that
that Gatsby is of some questionable ethnic background and has no pedigree, is Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And that's one of the quotes that I think sticks in my mind about the book, is Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, which is just the epitome of Tom Buchanan's kind of cruelty and bigotry, and is just such a breathtakingly contemptuous thing to say about a person. The other, the famous line that sort of has come back
into circulation recently because it's the title of this book about Facebook is The Careless People as a way of describing the destructiveness of wealth, that it's not only, let's say, viciousness or malignity or greed or contempt for other people. It's just carelessness. It's just not this sort of
reckless sense of entitlement that just be you're oblivious to the damage that it does around you. And that too is just because I think you think a lot about Fitzgerald and the particular kind of intelligence that he has
He was not a political activist or political writer. He was very kind of self-deprecating about his own intellectual powers. He would say that thinking for him was like a bunch of trunks moving around in the attic. And yet he was able to just get right at the very core of human behavior and of American life. And I don't think many other writers who have tried a lot harder, let's say, haven't managed to do it quite as
as sharply or succinctly. I would like to read that quote. And again, as you mentioned, a recent memoir by a former Facebook executive that is now a bestseller, the details of which are greatly contested by Facebook, now called Meta, takes its title from this book. It is called Careless People, and it takes this title from this quote. And the quote, the whole quote goes,
It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess that they had made.
The word careless three times in that, and meaning is slightly differently inflected each time. And yeah, and other people clean up the mess. Part of the reason I've read a couple of quotes from the book is because I recently had an experience that reminded me how beautiful the language is and how wonderful it is to hear it spoken out loud. You've referred to it a couple of times. It was a theatrical production called Gats. It was put on by
a company called Elevator Repair Service. It recently came through New York for what they say was the last time. And it basically is one person on stage surrounded by some other actors who participate, reading the entirety of The Great Gatsby over seven, eight hours. There are several intermissions. And hearing it that way, seeing it that way, having to focus on every sentence and every word that
in a way that I never had before because I was watching someone read it was incredible. It is great to see that the sort of the Andy Kaufman joke that what could be more boring than somebody reading The Great Gatsby to you in its entirety turns out to be like the great theatrical coup of the 21st century.
I would love if you could try at least to think of what you would tell people who maybe haven't read this book since high school or maybe they were assigned into high school, never read it. And we're trying to convince them to revisit it or read it for the first time. And it has this grand reputation around it. It's 100 years old now. Yeah. What do you tell them?
In some ways, we were talking about this a little before, sometimes the reputation can be a burden. And a surefire way to turn someone off to a great book is to say, this is a great book. This is the greatest American novel. Because then it becomes a kind of a burden. But I think it's one of those books that like,
just start reading it. And at a certain, within five or six pages, you will be hooked. You know, you can read it
in a day, and it has everything. It does have wild parties, and it does have heroes and villains, and it does have tragedy and comedy and satire and crime, and it's packed with just about every element of a good read that you could want. There's something for everyone in it, but also, it's a very moving book, and it's hard to say exactly in a way that
is both hard on the sleeve and a little bit sentimental, but also...
more complex and haunting. And somehow it has all of those things in what, like 150 pages. Tony Scott, A.O. Scott, author of the book review's recent piece, Looking at the Great Gatsby on its 100th anniversary. Please check it out if you haven't yet. Tony, thank you so much for joining the book review. It's always a delight to have you on. It is my pleasure. It's great talking with you, Gilbert.
That was my conversation with A.O. Scott about The Great Gatsby, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its publication this month. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.