The Man Without a Past: On the Sublimity of Jay Gatsby

Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century now, I took my copy to the spot where that nightingale fledged. There is a small pub garden by London’s Hampstead Heath where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the Romantic princeling John Keats, composed his "Ode to a Nightingale." Here, as in America, you first meet the book in school, and you take your personal clutch of gorgeous, fleet-footed lyrics; for me, that the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” and that Gatsby’s smile “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” Those treasures are precious, but in some way you feel they are so for what they will reveal. Everyone says you must reach a certain age to “really get” Gatsby.

Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby: On Teaching (And Reading) an American Classic

The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college, and now am a member of the great tribe of high school teachers who put it on our American Literature syllabi year after year, 100 years after its publication. Almost no text is so ubiquitously found in classrooms, which is also why it often draws righteous indignation and constant interrogation: Do more people need to read this, again? Is there really nothing else that would serve the same purpose? Are we being lazy educators, perpetuating a system that mindlessly privileges a few texts, identities, etc.? These are questions I ask every year, and every year, I choose again to teach it. The reasons are multifarious: I believe there is value in a canon (how many texts are we able to discuss with our peers, parents, and children?); I also think, contrary to the identitarian objection, the text raises interesting and relevant questions of class, gender, etc. But most importantly, Gatsby cares about language. Few texts so carefully ensure the fluidity or the languor of a sentence mirrors its function; few make you feel the slap of an em-dash or the runaway car of a string of commas. Gatsby doesn’t just tell you a story, it teaches you how to love language. In a world of identity politics, the ascendancy of tech, finance, and optimization, language itself is an increasingly rare concern. The art of paying careful attention to language is one we purport to teach in class. We call it close reading. I think Gatsby is a text that both represents and defends close reading. And it does need defending.

America the Beautiful: The Great Gatsby as Romantic Poetry

We could ask this question in two different ways. First, it might be remarkable that he was able to write any masterpieces at all, even if only one. A chronicler of his age’s excesses in gossipy romans à clef, a middling-to-poor student of elite institutions, a status-conscious social climber from a downwardly mobile Midwestern family, an Irish Catholic in a still-WASP-dominated America, and, eventually, a debilitated alcoholic in a failing marriage marked by intense mental instability — even allowing for the well-attested turbulence of the modern artist, the person described by this list of characteristics is not an obvious candidate for the author of the Great American Novel. Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway were also unstable, alcoholic, or both, but they wrote from experiences more intense, from settings more extraordinary, and from erudition more solid than anything offered by Fitzgerald’s gentlemanly-mediocre Princeton or gin-soaked Jazz Age New York. Fitzgerald himself feared that in having been drafted too late to see combat in the Great War, he had missed his opportunity not only for heroism but for crucial literary material. How did a person so apparently unserious write The Great Gatsby, which is, on the centenary of its publication, the only 20th-century American novel every literate American has read? The question could be asked the other way, too, though: why did an author with such a rich literary gift only write one great book, even allowing for his alcoholism, his bad marriage, his decadent social scene, and all the rest of it?

April Fools: A Short Story About Adolescence and Suicide

The boy died on the first of April, so the police were slow to respond. The first of April was a big day for false alarms. My mother worked dispatch for Alachua and fielded all the calls. Every year, she listened to teenagers report cases of mammoth erections and spontaneous combustion. Maybe twice a decade, a kid would do something inventive with bath salts and launch himself into juvie. But most of the calls were total jokes. Still, my mother’s job was to send the police like a good little Samaritan. Her officers quickly stretched thin. That year, a representative from the department stopped by our school to speak over the intercom about making smart choices on April Fools’ Day. “It’s a crime to fake a crime,” he said, but he didn’t tell us what the punishment would be if we got caught. Or maybe he did. I was too busy looking out the window to listen. A pair of enormous crows was picking apart the unlucky carcass of an armadillo, which felt like big news at the time — I didn’t yet know about the boy. I was in Discrete Math, a low-level half-course for borderline morons who didn’t need to take Pre-Calculus. No one in Discrete Math was graduating on time. Sixteen of us had to repeat the year. The school had concocted a whole schedule of specialized courses to convince us it was still worth our while to wake up at six AM five days a week. My desk mate, Nick, threw a penny at the intercom, but it fell very short and struck Ms. Galanis in the chest. She was flat enough that the coin dropped immediately to the floor. It might as well have hit the wall.

Childhood is Over: On Adam Ross’ Playworld

It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. What other choice do we have? Adulthood comes for all of us, sooner or later. We might mourn what we’ve lost. Or we might be relieved that childhood — with its attendant confusion, anxiety, and lack of freedom — is over. Either way, there’s no turning back. Griffin Hurt, the young protagonist of Playworld, an outstanding new novel by Adam Ross, is a student of adulthood. Precocious and observant, he absorbs its manners and mores, familiarizes himself with its customs and concealments. The world of adults is disorienting and opaque, but he learns how to ingratiate himself with them, approximate their behavior. Like a kid trying on his father’s clothing, he might be able to convince you that the suit jacket is his — but look closer, and you’ll see the tailoring is off.

Amputation: An Exclusive Excerpt from Bruce Wagner’s Forthcoming Novel

The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them were topless but still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper gave his stock lifestyle-response, his Pete Davidson/Chad ‘Cool,’ and Rory, smiling with a degree of seriousness, said, ‘I’m making my own decisions. I’m my own legal guardian and people don’t understand that.’ He invited the surfer over and whoa the manse was a fuckin motherlode. Trooper’s uncle couldn’t believe all the shit he stole—the trans bros were so rich they didn’t notice or care. His uncle said, ‘Hell, we need to go back,’ but they never got it together. But now the fires were coming and the unbreasted coven was comatose from G—all of them AirPodded except Rory, who loved his cheap Dóttir Freedoms headphones, and Jank, who loved his (Dad’s) $8,000 HIFIMAN Susvara Planar Magnetics—so no one heard the cold, cyclonic 80 mph Santa Anas—Didion and Ray Chandler wouldn’t know a cold Santa Ana if it super-scooped them from the grave, but that’s what it was—cold, cold, cold—all were oblivious to the embers ghost gust-riding the winds to dance with the detonated nitrous tanks in the guest house stocked for the Armin van Buuren DJ’d dumbly titled ‘Fyre Too!’ house party fest set for tomorrow. Nor did they watch the roof/walls blow out and marry the firestorm—nor see the cathedral-size canyon overlook living room window explode, instantly severing the Neo Rauch Die Herrin canvas (and Jank’s left subclavian). Nor could they witness the on-fire cougar studded with fatal shrapnel quills that cannonballed into the tableau like some animatronic loser fleeing di Cosimo’s great painting of a forest inferno; nor hear its sick-making stereophonic scream or smell the febrile anal bloodstink of its extirpation at the foot of the melted Basquiat black crowned king (a gift from Mom to Dad) and the melty Kara Walker and smelting steel-titted Louise Bourgeois’s The Good Mother (gift from Dad to Mom). Eerily, their cadavers were preserved (mostly) by a timely windblown plash of pink retardant, enough for an astute fireman to note in the aftermath that each had the same horizontal sub-aureole scar, i.e. what was believed to be a rich boys’ sleepover was amended by the coroner to a gaggle of FTM twinks.

Tragedy and Its Discontents: On Moshe Zvi Marvit’s Nothing Vast

One of the chief pleasures of Moshe Zvi Marvit’s sweeping family saga Nothing Vast is the way it transports you to places and times that feel soothingly distant from here and now. His characters move from Morocco and Poland to France, America, and Israel, and we meet them at various times between 1932 and 1973. Here is the sweet, foamy tea of 1935 Casablanca, poured from high above the table to keep the sand out; there, the “grimy” port city of 1956 Marseille and the boiling America of 1965, where “workers were rising up against fat business owners called pigs and taking over the factories.” Being immersed in these worlds and periods, however turbulent, is a pleasure, even though part of the point is that they aren’t really so distant after all. As Faulkner might have put it, the past of a family or nation is never dead; it’s not even past.

“Ten Years of Useless Labor”: On Danzy Senza’s Colored Television

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” and “inclusion” in post-2020 America. Senna has traversed this terrain for a quarter-century in fiction and memoir, deploying a mix of dark humor, historical insight, and pop-culture fluency to craft narratives of biracial women and men — or, to use the term she prefers, mulattos. On that model, Colored Television features quotations from Jefferson’s letters, parodies of mid-century sociology texts, meditations on Carol Channing, cameos by Kim and Kanye. But this collage of content is held together by forms and themes as old as the novel itself — mimetic desire, status-chasing, and marital troubles, to name a few. Much of the plot is set in motion by a scene that could have been ripped from the pages of Balzac, Dreiser, or Richard Wright, not to mention Cervantes: A woman sees an image of a happy family in a sales catalog, and tries to make her own life look like theirs. Personal and professional mayhem ensues, much of it very funny. Senna’s relentless cynicism will likely titillate the readers of the Good Morning America Book Club, but it also hamstrings her capacities as a social critic.

Stalking the Trillion-Footed Digital Beast: On Udith Dematagoda’s Agonist

Whatever your feelings about the internet and its tortuous torrential stream of information, misinformation, fragments of dialogue, rants, advertisements, etc., it is, for better or worse — good or evil — totalizing in its effects, and here to stay. Social media, as part of the online ecosystem, has made its own insidious specific contributions as part of this “world wide web” (as the internet used to be called) and users have no qualms about exposing their lives online. Tens of millions of people panic about how to share their “hot takes” or transform their little acts of daily living, no matter how banal, into posts, and then sit and desperately wait for approval, counting the “likes” they receive to tally up their sense of self-worth.

Interstellar Ineptitude: On Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public. Any consumer of contemporary literature is familiar with the end result of this compromise: small “l” literary with enough genre convention to find its way into book clubs, morally ambiguous but not so much as to obscure its political message (lest The Guardian have to think of adjectives beyond “urgent” and “important” in their praise), with prose elevated beyond the typical Taylor Jenkins Reid fare but never so much as to alienate the typical Taylor Jenkins reader. They are magical realist murder mysteries, multigenerational historical epics, Westerns and dystopians that are just anticlimactic enough to escape the “genre” label.

Cooties and Careers: On Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt

Ty Rossberg ought to try being a serial killer. He’d at least be more loved than what he is in Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt: a straight white male writer during the dawn of the Trump era. While his girlfriend Jenny Marks’ new essay collection is the hottest book of the year, he is relegated to playing the once prestigious, now subordinate, role as sole breadwinner (as a management consultant). Her semi-truthful account of her abortion captivates audiences, elevating her to the “literary equivalent of the Rolling Stones, or at least the National,” as Ty snidely remarks to himself while attending her reading in Chicago.

The Hotel Egypt is an exploration of a modern American man’s yearning to be needed and relevant. The results are mixed, with a relatively strong first part that wanders into the surreal and which ultimately undermines the story’s initial intriguing bitterness. In many ways, Ty has a great life: he has an apparent soulmate for a girlfriend (both he and Jenny grew up together in Queens, went to the same schools, and have similar literary ambitions), he has a well-paying career, and he lives comfortably in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood. Yet something crucial is missing in his life.

Summer’s Gone: On Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

It’s not a book for summer. Despite the yellow checkered cover, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which came out in September, is most certainly a winter book. The yellow is wrong anyway, not the yellow of sun, but instead tinged with a sickness, the checkered pattern alternating between subdued yellow and gray. Like a jaundiced hue, the cover blends in with the orange and marigold seats on the subway, configuration and color of a D train about to be defunct. Shortly after Intermezzo came out, my ex bought me a copy at Target. It was from the Brooklyn Target in Caesar’s Bay with a view of Coney Island on one side and the Verrazzano on the other. It was still warm, the waves outside the box stores lapping like summer. And I thought, how wonderful it must be to have every type of literary success. Rooney is equally displayed at indie bookstores, on the cool hotgirl IG pages, and also under the bright, antiseptically illuminated aisles of big box stores. But it took several attempts to truly commit to this book.

Escaping the Panopticon: On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

What do you need to build a panopticon? If you ask the ghost of Jeremy Bentham, who originated the concept in the late 18th century, he’d say something like the following: you need a circular building with a central observation tower staffed by a single guard. You need the ring of the building to be built with cells filled with prisoners who are being observed by the guard in the tower. If you ask the contemporary liberal subject — the citizen of a free society — you’d receive a more complicated answer. The modern concept of a panopticon isn’t confined to a single building, but expands into the more sprawling, networked, and technologically sophisticated notion of the authoritarian surveillance state.

A Tepid Search for Genius: On Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.”

The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.

The Blind Spot: On Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Boxing is the most honest of sports. The boxer, unlike the normal person, steps into the ring and willingly accepts that he’ll be punched in the face. Anyone can throw a punch at a heavy bag, but you’re not a boxer until you’ve eaten some punches and nodded like a demented little freak at the guy trying to take you out. Years ago, in the heat of my boxing fandom, I had my dad buy me a pair of gloves and I proceeded to throw jabs and hooks and uppercuts into the air. The great Mexican fighter, Julio César Chávez, was one of my heroes, and, so, for a brief interlude in the burgeoning days of my adolescent baseball career, I thought that I’d give boxing a go. I was already a jock, after all, so the transition would be easy. I was a tough kid, too. I’d watched hundreds of bouts alongside my dad, so, like a typical young man, I thought: I can do that. I can throw a punch. I can bob and weave and bounce off the ropes and attack my opponents with body shots and keep coming. I can surely take a punch.