But enough of this introduction, what did I think about The Great Gatsby?
In a few words: a medium quality, fast read; well-written and attractive for its image of the decadent Jazz Age of the 1920s, but also seriously flawed in several respects.
(1) the sodden melodrama (though hidden under the narrator's lightness of touch) - The Great Gatsby is the story of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby who owns a lavish mansion on Long Island where he hosts extravagant parties. As later becomes clear, his only purpose is to come into contact again with his former flame Daisy, who lives across the Bay, exactly opposite him, and who is now married to another very rich man, Tom Buchanan. This Tom, by the way, is an ugly fascistoid white supremacist; he also has a mistress, Myrtle, the disgruntled wife of a garage owner on the outskirts of New York. Although Daisy is a vapid and spiritual empty shell who only floats where the money is (she was brought up in a rich household herself, how could it be otherwise), we have to believe that Gatsby has been madly in love with her, even though she jilted him for $$ five years ago when he was still poor. The present fortune of Gatsby, by the way, has been obtained through bootlegging and other illegal pursuits - he is hand in glove with several gangsters. The crisis comes when Gatsby openly professes his love and tries to pry Daisy loose from Tom. Then Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, inadvertently runs over and kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run traffic accident (a plot twist that is rather too coincidental to be believable); the garage owning husband, who knows the car, goes after Gatsby - thinking that he was the driver - and kills him in his swimming pool to take revenge for the traffic accident before committing suicide - and yes, he also confused Gatsby with Tom Buchanan as the lover of his wife. Final curtain. Isn't this a cheap soap opera? Of course, Gatsby's funeral is a very lonely affair as all the partying people have already forgotten about him and anyway, they hate contact with death. The Great Gatsby is, if anything, aesthetically overrated, with a plot that is just silly. (Between brackets: that is why the plotless stories of, for example, Chekhov are so great - too much plot is just ridiculous. Life doesn't have a plot, either).
(2) the unnatural characterization - this is not a realistic novel, but a fable. The love of Gatsby for Daisy is not made plausible in the book, probably also because Daisy is only a piece of fluff. It is Scott-Fitzgerald's fault that he does not fill in the attraction or the psychological motivation between these two main players. It now seems that Daisy doesn't really return Gatsby's feelings but only plays along with him out of boredom, or to take avenge on her philandering husband - the novel certainly is not a "love story" as many people seem to believe (again due to reading the book as a teenager, I guess). When coming to Gatsby, I had just read John Updike's Couples and kept comparing both books - after all, both novels tell stories of adultery and love for a married woman. I found Updike vastly superior. His characters are just as ugly - in different ways - as those in The Great Gatsby, but they are real. His protagonists also behave like grown-ups do in the real world - no coincidental deadly traffic accidents, no convenient murders and no suicides here. But the attraction people may feel for the partner of another and the complex emotional problems such behavior engenders, are only properly addressed in Couples, while The Great Gatsby skims the surface by opting for cheap melodrama. In the end, neither Gatsby nor Daisy are believable characters. I don't mind that the characters are not likeable (unlikeable characters populate the greatest novels of the world) but I object to their being not real. The book is psychologically vacant.
There is also one plus point:
Not everything is bad in The Great Gatsby, and I probably would like the book better if it was not so overhyped. The descriptions of the parties Gatsby hosts are immaculate, Scott-Fitzgerald here demonstrates clearly the decadent, empty spirit of those times - in a most enjoyable way. And the style is beautifully polished, without calling too much attention to itself.
My final judgement:
But, when we make up the final reckoning, the positives are by far not enough to save this book as a superb novel, let alone the Great American Novel it has been made out to be. It can't compare with anything Henry James has written (surely, The Wings of the Dove is much better!), nor with Moby Dick, or Huckleberry Finn, or The Adventures of Augie March, Rabbit Run, Gravity's Rainbow, American Pastoral, and many others. Perhaps it is so popular because it is short and easy to consume.