Full of flaws: A great American novel

“Antisemitic? Check. Racist? Check. Nativist? Check. (Let’s set aside sexist and homophobic for the moment.) If you want to subject ‘The Great Gatsby’ to a political purity test, it flunks. ‘Gatsby’ is at once timeless and time-bound, a social novel of the 1920s as much as it is a free-floating Great American Novel. But view the novel in its entirety rather than in isolated passages…”

So writes Maureen Corrigan in “So We Read On” (2014), her 300-page, almost worshipful critique of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Here Corrigan offers a checklist of its many flaws in what she considers to be the greatest of all American novels. Greatest? Check. But flawed? Check. A novel without flaws has never been and never will be written here in the United States or any place else.

Fitzgerald (1896-1940) has created a masterpiece of lyrical writing. His opening words, spoken by the 30-year-old narrator, Nick Carraway, are elegant in their simplicity: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ ”

To supply detail to his scathing criticism of the blind and empty lives of America’s super rich in the year 1922, Fitzgerald invents two exclusive communities on Long Island’s north shore: West Egg, home of the nouveau riche, where Gatsby stages his lavish summer galas; and East Egg, home of the inherited wealth of “old money,” where Tom and Daisy live their life of luxury. Both the East-Eggers and the West-Eggers work and play in Manhattan, which Fitzgerald portrays as the embodiment of capitalism run amok.

Fitzgerald is especially harsh in his criticism of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whose unreflective sense of privilege echoes through the decades to infect a significant portion of today’s super-rich Americans:

“They were careless people…they smashed up things and people 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…”

“The Great Gatsby” breathes class consciousness – well documented by the contrast between the Buchanans’ East Egg “old money” and Jay Gatsby’s West Egg new money. Gatsby’s quest for Daisy’s love was doomed from the start – born a poor boy, now made wealthy by ill-gotten gain. No match for Daisy’s inherited wealth. Not even close. Worlds apart. “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”

Gatsby was so consumed by “the colossal vitality of his illusion” of what he thought and felt about Daisy that he was incapable of seeing how utterly shallow, how empty she really was – a woman who calls her husband Tom “very profound” because “He reads deep books with long words in them”.

The vast differences between socio-economic classes in the early '20s walled Americans into claustrophobic groupings. To this very day, a number of Americans continue to bow before the idol of inherited wealth.

Indeed, the novel is permeated with images of crowding and confinement: rush hour in mid-town Manhattan, Gatsby’s lavish weekend parties, jammed with uninvited guests who follow “the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park,” the shut-in space of a secret love-nest hidden in an unassuming apartment on Manhattan’s West 158th St., even the suffocating, overheated parlor of the Plaza Hotel – all symbolizing class-caused claustrophobia. Most of all, the novel features the failure of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy as the uncrossable boundary between the classes into which they were born.

All the pieces of “The Great Gatsby” seem to fit together into a work of consummate artistry. Yet, at least for me, the novel is deeply flawed by Fitzgerald’s profoundly antisemitic cartoon caricature of the gambler-gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, the man with sufficient criminal “smarts” to avoid prosecution for “fixing” the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald’s first words regarding Wolfsheim: “A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.”

I feel somewhat ashamed to confess that – despite the stain of Fitzgerald’s antisemitism, as well as the stain of his racism and his anti-immigrant leanings and his sexism and his homophobia – I find his novel as a whole to be both brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed. God willing, I will live long enough to read it again and, possibly, yet again.

The lyricism of Fitzgerald’s writing makes “The Great Gatsby” as much a prose poem as a detailed indictment of America’s running-off-the-track early Twenties. Fitzgerald’s lyricism persists through his final sentence, an eloquent expression of his quest for past and future: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.