The Great Gatsby. A literary classic. So I am supposed to like it, right? And it’s not as if I didn’t enjoy it, I guess I was just expecting something more. I was also surprised by just how short it is! A mere 180 pages.

This was my first time reading it, having somehow avoided it being assigned as required reading in high school and college. The character of Gatsby is sort of shrouded in secrecy for the majority of the narrative and I found myself quite curious to learn more about him, to discover those secrets. So when I did discover those secrets, well, it just turned out to be rather anticlimactic. Sad and hopeless, but anticlimactic nonetheless.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island in a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

The most interesting thing about this book, for me, was the narrative style. While it is told in first person, the first person narrator, Nick Carraway, is little more than observer. He is sidelined from the action and is delegated more to witnessing the drama of his wealthy–what to call them?–companions. And that is an odd way to tell a story and few novels, in fact, use this technique. But it works here. It would be such a different story if Daisy or Tom or even Jordan were telling this tale. Somehow Nick is privy to information that other characters are not and as such, we learn more about the world and its characters than we would have otherwise. And it’s a neat way to sort of discover and experience things as Nick does.

I can appreciate the novel for its artistic merits as well as its subjacent commentary of American excess, decadence and disillusionment. Fitzgerald has a skilled hand and his prose is often quite lovely and also haunting, with the capacity to linger in you. (In fact one of my favorite quotations of all time comes from his Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise: “I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”) And the ending sentences of The Great Gatsby are among some of most beautiful.

All that said (or more appropriately written,) I much prefer Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise to this one.