John Updike, ‘This Side of Coherence’, “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, 1999:
“…If Hemingway was the master of danger abroad, purposefully experienced in foreign wars and Spanish bullfights and African safaris,Fitzgerald flattered our national consciousness with a sense of domestic danger, of the failure and rebuke that haunt every aspiration, of youthful overreaching swiftly followed by adult collapse, of a native romanticism courting the vengeance of blind destiny—a pattern illustrated in his one well-designed novel, The Great Gatsby….
…The early death of a writer, besides shortening by a few unwritten volumes the shelves of books that weigh on our consciences, confirms our instinct that art, especially the literary art, should be sublimely difficult—a current from beyond that burns out the wire….”
Jeffrey Meyers , WSJ, April 4 2025:
“…“The Great Gatsby” brilliantly expresses major themes of American literature: the idealism and morality of the country’s Midwest (where most of the characters originate and where Nick returns at the end of the novel) in contrast to the disillusionment and corruption of the East (where the novel takes place); the frontier myth of the self-made man. It also portrays the attempt to escape the materialistic present and recapture the innocent past; the predatory power of rich and beautiful women; the limited possibilities of love in the modern world; the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life; the doomed attempt to sustain illusions and recapture the American dream.”
Gatsby generated by ChatGPT for me
"Here it is—your stylized Great Gatsby moment, captured like a dreamy oil painting. Gatsby stands poised in the golden glow of his mansion, surrounded by the shimmer and swirl of a 1920s party, with Daisy nearby, both of them caught in that fragile moment between longing and illusion."
