Here is a list of the hundred best novels, according to the Modern Library board. Scanning it, I think it must actually be the hundred best English-language novels published since about 1900--no Tolstoy, no Russian, no Dickens, no Jane Austen, no Middlemarch, no Melville or Hawthorne or Mark Twain.
I was at the site because I googled "100 best novels" in order to see where The Great Gatsby would come in. It's always near the top of these lists, and yep, there it is, at number 2, sandwiched at the pinnacle between two works by James Joyce. Is it overrated? Not as much as A Portrait of the Artist! My theory is that these books are read and talked about mainly at colleges and universities, where there are often constraints of time and a desire to expose students to an array of "standard authors," so the brevity of The Great Gatsby gives it a boost. In Survey of American Literature, it's always assigned, along with a couple of stories by Hemingway, a story of Faulkner's (or maybe As I Lay Dying, which is also brief), some poems by Frost, and "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock." I'm not being flip, these are all great works, but I'm not sure they're greater than other works of the period that make their entrance farther down this list of novels. You're not going to assign such immense works as An American Tragedy, USA, or Studs Lonigan. Any of them would consume the whole term, just to get the pages turned. So, of American novels of the period between the two world wars--The Great Gatsby just has the most exposure.
But paging through my copy now I feel more inclined to defend its high reputation. It's not long but not wispy, either. I see that the passages I marked as a college student still have for me a strong appeal. Of seasonal interest, because it just happened to me, is Daisy's question, in almost the first scene:
She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."
Seems like an odd thing to "watch for" or be radiant about. Her husband soon interrupts her languor:
"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
"Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
Vacancy--intellectual, moral--in society's upper crust: the theme of the book. Gatsby shouldn't have wanted in. I put an exclamation mark next to
[Gatsby] took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.
and another next to narrator Nick Carraway's final judgment:
I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things 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 they had made . . . .
One of the qualities of the book is the way in which this sharp verdict is rendered within a dusky glow of disappointment and wistful longing for something genuine and better. Of one of the anonymous and forgotten attendees of one of Gatsby's summer parties, Fitzgerald writes: "Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face."
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