The fact that Gatsby is so popular and so highly regarded means that this false image has been allowed to profligate, to lodge itself and warp our perceptions of a difficult and hard to define era. In terms of representation in literature, The Sound and The Fury comes far closer to achieving the truth. Thousands boozed and partied their way through the twenties millions more sweated and suffered.
Isn’t it? Weren’t the twenties like that? Yes – for a select group of people, living in select parts of New York, living select lives. Gatsby is a very accurate portrayal of the decadent Jazz Age, a time when the liquor was cheap and the morals were loose. I do think it should be read and enjoyed – there’s no denying it is, in its own way, a phenomenal book – but I think that the portrait it paints, and the image we’ve come to accept of America in the 1920’s is quite incomplete. In Germany, we had the genteel outrage of Stefan Zweig and the unflinching decadence of Hans Fallada in France, Proust was just finishing In Search of Lost Time. For a lot of people my age, you first find your feet in this dizzying era with novels like The Great Gatsby, if only because we were forced to read it for our GCSEs. From the Modernist boom in writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to the ‘lost generation’ realism of Hemingway and Fitzgerald himself, it was all happening in the twenties. The 1920’s were one of the richest and most interesting decades for literature. I think The Sound and the Fury is a far superior novel, and in my opinion we should all be rushing to read more Faulkner.
But I do think that The Great Gatsby is placed far too highly on a pedestal, and when people limit their reading about America in the 1920’s to Fitzgerald and Gatsby they’re really missing out. In its place, I’m going to suggest an alternative that we should all read and talk about as much as we have done Gatsby.
Scott Fitzgerald’s place in the canon is well deserved and, before I go any further, I’ll admit that I’m no expert on him or his work this is purely my opinion. I don’t think it’s a bad book, but I don’t think that it’s a great one, either.
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