Gatsby Gatsby Gatsby, by Richard Hobby

Can second-rate novels produce great movies? SLL’s unofficial movie critic Richard Hobby weighs in. From Hobby at thosewholovemecantakethetrain.substack.com:

When my friend Max was a junior in high school, he called me up and said he had had to read The Great Gatsby and . . . he hated it!

Here is what Max said:

A thoughtless person reading Gatsby would conclude that people with money are fake and live superficial lives, doing whatever they want because they are rich, that they are careless and insensitive and egotistical—whether they be old money or nouveau riche. Fitzgerald gives us a stereotype and it is awful. Gatsby himself is a giant joke and a liar. Nick Carraway is a well-educated but unreliable narrator, who—despite the opening lines with his father’s advice not to judge people—judges everyone. And anyway this is not a profound idea. The last line—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”—is a cheap ending. Fitzgerald is a scoundrel. He takes cheap shots at the American Dream saying oh well sure you are rich but are you really living? Of course they are living! The idea that if you are rich you can’t be happy is something that comes from envious people who want to be rich but can’t and this upsets them so they say nasty things about the upper class. The book is a joke. Awful propaganda. Just plain wrong.

Max was—and is—capable of taking on the entire literary establishment . . . and winning!

Since I had always thought the novel was just high-gloss melodrama, I was delighted with Max’s take-no-prisoners assault.

The novel does have one truly great line. Jordan Baker says: “Anyhow, he gives large parties. And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” This remark is worthy of (the often underestimated) Oscar Wilde: while appearing to be just a clever bon mot, it is a deep and useful insight.

But aside from that one line, the novel is forgettable.

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