Month: December 2007

wanting to look squarely at everyone

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p. 20:

Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone and yet to avoid all eyes.

A pleasant social dinner dissipates in the tension between a man and woman silently waging war over the uninvited guest who isn’t there. When you’re sitting at the table as a peaceful noncombatant, you want to meet everyone’s gaze with a fair and level look in return, but it’s too painful to look anyone in the eyes because that’s what they want too, and everyone’s faking it. Have you been there?

Quite a few small phrases on this page stick in my head: Daisy’s “tense gayety” on returning to the dinner table from a clenched discussion with Tom, the “shrill metallic urgency” of the phone that wouldn’t stop ringing, the way Tom and Jordan stroll back to the house with “several feet of twilight between them.”

like a rose

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p. 19:

I am not even faintly like a rose.

This phrase is not lyrical, it’s not magical, it’s not the typical language love case for me. It’s just that this is the most deliberate attempt at humor in the whole novel, a dry sardonic humor very much like the fashionable postmodern irony of today. I just like the way it sounds in Nick’s narration, and it sticks in my head.

The other phrase I like on this page comes when Nick and Jordan “exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning” when Daisy ran into the house to argue quietly with Tom over the dinnertime phone calls from his girl. I know just what it feels like to get and to give such a glance, and you’ll recognize it in this phrase.

children leaving a pleasant street at dusk

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p:18:

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

This simile – the sunlight leaving her face like children from a street at dusk – is one of the phrases that made me want to write this blog. I keep using the words “beautiful,” “lovely,” “gorgeous” because my vocabulary is so thin, I have no power over language like this man. This simile is all that, well beyond what my simple words can describe. Along with the clear romanticism and tribute to beauty, for this modern reader there’s a paean to lost childhood – do kids really play on the street anymore, running for home as their mothers call out their names in the twilight?

And that whole sentence, I just noticed now, is actually a metaphor for an entire love affair, an entire life of a beautiful woman. There’s this shallow trend now towards flash fiction – it’s hard to sustain bursts of imagery like this over an entire novel, so people try it in paragraphs and pages. But this one sentence shames many of those efforts.

My distant second choice for this page is the way Miss Baker chats about California and “Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.” Brilliant observation that body language interrupts as much as the spoken word.

their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire

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p. 17:

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.

These women aren’t quite human, but they’re exactly what a young man sees when he’s confronted with their unattainable allure. Fitzgerald is sometimes criticized for his depiction of women, but I think the critics miss the point – he doesn’t know women, and his writing does a perfect rendering of that area of inexpertise.

moving a checker to another square

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p. 16:

wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

This captures exactly the feeling of being maneuvered from room to room by an overbearing, physically intimidating host. Your individuality, your humanity even gets a little lost, you aren’t there for your own ends but as a piece in a larger game of another’s design. And of course the game is checkers, not chess, given Tom’s limited mental faculties. Er, not that I’m saying checkers is for dummies, but still – all checkers pieces only move forward until they reach the end.

Also on this page I find memorable charm in Daisy’s simplistic babble: ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.’ Yeah, me too, hon, me too.

a series of rapid, deft movements

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p. 15:

she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

I like the cinematic quality of this description of Jordan’s languid physical grace. Fitzgerald doesn’t describe what she does – maybe she brushes off her dress, flexes her hands, crosses and uncrosses her legs. But who knows, it’s just those “rapid, deft movements” – the actual motions are less important than the way they look on the screen. That “stood up into the room” phrase can seem curious: she’s already in the room, how can she enter it again by standing up? But it works because it’s like a shot in a movie, where you see her come into the frame as she stands up. I haven’t seen any film version of this book in part because I can’t stand to have the picture in my mind interpreted another way, or worse, not interpreted at all.

I also like this look at Jordan’s face: “Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face.” These women are mean, but you don’t realize it, you never realize it until long after it’s over.