Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby’s great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald’s great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. “Splendor,” Fitzgerald came to understand, “was something in the heart.

young people no longer “believe in the old standards and authorities, and they’re not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.

This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility.

Ultimately Fitzgerald chose not to use the word "America" at all in the novel's concluding passage. America remains an emblem -- not quite a metaphor, but a symbol, a figure, the fact as colossal as a continent -- and what it represents is not a specific nation but a human capacity, our capacity for hope, for wonder, for discovery. It represents the corruption of that capacity into a faith in the material world, rather than the ideal one. And it reminds us, too of our careless habit of losing our paradises.

Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic—and that’s one of the flaws of the book.

America was invented out of a desire for rebirth, for fresh starts. It was the place where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself as an aristocrat, but somehow these stories of renaissance kept ending in murder.

The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.

The Volstead Act, prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of “intoxicating liquors,” became law on January 17, 1920. Prohibition didn’t prohibit much, and incited a great deal. By September 1922 it was already obvious that prohibition, known with varying degrees of irony as the Great Experiment, was experimenting mostly with the laws of unintended consequences. Its greatest success was in loosening the nation’s inhibitions with bathtub gin—what they called “synthetic” liquor.

They thought Bacchus was presiding over the festivities, until Nemisis appeared - the retributive goddess whom the Romans aptly called Invidia. Nothing would surive but the stories, the tales of a quest for lasting pleasure, which left a trace of beauty: the disarray of falling stars didn't come to naught after all.

The problem with unreliable narrators is that sometimes they tell the truth - it's just difficult to know when.

The Great Gatsby emerges from a world strewn with wreckage and that debris is the novel's material - sullied, but with the hope of something redeemable glinting among the ash heaps.

Drinking was a great leveller, not because it made everyone equally drunk but because it made everyone equally guilty.

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

Desire just cheats you,” laments Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. “It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people, for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.