Jocelyn McClurg| USA TODAY
It's been 89 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published. Since then it's been read and revered by millions who've been captivated by the glittery, tragic tale of Jay Gatsby and his elusive love, Daisy Buchanan. One of those is Maureen Corrigan, 59, the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. Corrigan, who lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at Georgetown University, spoke with USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg about her new book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown).
Q: You boldly state that The Great Gatsby isn't just the great American novel. It's the "greatest," you say. What's the No. 1 reason why?
A: The language. I think it's a novel that takes ordinary American language and makes it unearthly. The story that it tells of somebody trying to be better, trying to be greater, trying to be more is certainly a story we identify as an American story. It's the way Fitzgerald tells it that just takes your breath away.
Q: You've read the novel about 50 times. Why is it a book that can be read over and over?
A: Every time I read it I find something new in it. Sometimes it's because a student will point out something that somehow weirdly I have not noticed before. Years ago a student said, in terms of the drowning imagery, everybody in the novel is drinking themselves to death, they're drowning themselves in liquor. And my jaw dropped open. It's so obsessively designed, you get tons of symbols on every page. And yet as Jonathan Franzen said, it's like swallowing whipped cream, you can read it and not notice so much of that stuff.
Q: What about Gatsby particularly resonates with contemporary readers?
A: That sense of the poor boy trying to remake himself, aiming for the stars. I read that Bill Gates has a quote from The Great Gatsby in his mansion outside of Seattle, and I thought, of course he does. That notion that you're Mister Nobody from nowhere, and all of a sudden you rise up out of the crowd and you're special. But it's also the pathos of the story. Maybe you can rise up for a little while but you're going to be pulled down again, inevitably, by your own past, by the weight of your dreams, by fate. If it were just a success story it wouldn't touch people as deeply as it does.
Q: Why didn't you didn't like Gatsby when you first read it in high school?
A: I thought it was a boring novel about rich people. I was in high school, so I was stupid, right? I grew up in a blue-collar part of Queens. I think when we start reading, especially as teenagers, we're reading to see ourselves in books, and boy there was nobody in Gatsby who I really identified with. It wasn't until I got to grad school and had to start teaching it and re-read it that I started to fall under its spell. I started to identify with Nick (Carraway, the narrator), that voice of longing and regret.
Q: Is there an ideal age to read Gatsby?
A: There's a Gatsby for every age. If I ran the world, I'd say 40. But it's not lost on the young. It's a different Gatsby for them, but it's a good one. It's a younger Gatsby that's full of excitement and emotion and yearning.
Q: Part of its charm and appeal, you say, is its brevity.
A: Of course that's part of the reason it's assigned in high school, too. Fitzgerald was a poet; he revered Keats, Shakespeare. He wrote like a poet. It makes sense that it would be short. He could pack so much into a couple of lines, a couple of paragraphs. I think the fact that it's short just makes it this intense, streamlined powerhouse of a novel. He was best at short stories, and Gatsby as a short novel really was his masterpiece, maybe in part because it was short.
Q: You call Baz Luhrmann's adaptation a "silly champagne bubble of a film." I guess you didn't like it.
A: I liked the spectacle of it, the spectacle of wild wretched excess of the 1920s. But I thought Luhrmann really shortchanged the class anxieties and class criticism in the novel. Fitzgerald wanted money, he wanted to live high, and he also read Marx. He's a guy who's always got ambivalence about everything he wants. The rich are held up and the rich are also regarded with contempt in this novel.
Q: The Great Gatsby was forgotten when Fitzgerald died in 1940. Then GIs in World War II rescued it when it was chosen for the Armed Services editions program.
A: It's amazing that Gatsby was chosen. My best educated guess is that the manager of the Scribner bookstore who served on the selection committee was responsible. It was nowhere. Fitzgerald couldn't even get it before his death when he would go around in Hollywood with his girlfriend Sheila Graham and try to buy his books in bookstores. A lot of the bookstore owners thought he was dead. And of course the books weren't on the shelf.
Q: Would Fitzgerald now have to disagree with his famous line, "There are no second acts in American lives?"
A: Was that ever wrong. I think he would have loved the money, he would have loved the fame. He knew he had written a masterpiece, and it tortured him that it wasn't recognized. He would have been profoundly moved by how central Gatsby is to American culture.
Q: Why do you like to visit Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Md.?
A: The grave of Scott and (his wife) Zelda is covered over with a slab that has the last words of The Great Gatsby written on it. ("And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.") I love to go there because I love to read those words. I sentimentally I like to say, "You did it, you wrote the great American novel," and offer that up as a kind of prayer to Fitzgerald. And I also like to see what people leave there. They leave liquor bottles and coins and sometimes they leave their own manuscripts, costume jewelry. It's a miniature shrine for people who know it's there.