The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This was our first book for our new Classics Books Discussion group at the Library. Meeting on Thursdays, once a month at 1 pm, we are choosing the books from the Big Read sponsored by The National Endowment of the Arts. We had a small group for our first discussion, but there is promise there, as people have shown an interest. We talked most about our own insecurities, our competition with others, and the American dream of acquiring wealth and what it means. All the characters in the novel were flawed in their own way. We find out that Gatsby is driven to New York to acquire his dream girl, Mrs. Daisy Buchanan, married to Tom Buchanan. After going off to the first World War, when he comes back to Louisiana, he finds that Daisy and her husband are on their honeymoon. He has to win her back by acquiring wealth and social status. He buys or rents the house across the Long Island Sound, to stare at the green light at the end of the dock at the Buchanan home. We discussed whether Jay Gatsby would ever really fit into Daisy's world. Just as Myrtle would never really stay with Tom, or that he would even take her permanently. Nick decided that the Buchanans are just careless, running away to avoid the truth if it embarrassed them. Conspiring together over the kitchen table, Nick notices the intimate world they live in that Gatsby will never be able to separate them. Gatsby is stunned. He is so sure that Daisy will call, he is still not realistic at the end. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald when he is just 29 years old, it seems so sad that the prominence this novel has achieved could not have been realized while he was still alive. Much of Nick is Fitzgerald, always the boy looking on, from early school to his Princeton years, he was socialising with the wealthy, but never quite meeting the mark. His whole dissolution with the wealthy types is portrayed in this novel extremely well. I think is is as great as everyone says, and his writing is poetry, and it is the type of novel I love to savor and revisit. Our next novel for November 17th will be The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, about the restrictions on the classes during the Gilded Age in New York.