p. 46:

I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know

I like this notion of a party as a vast river, with rushing waters and hidden depths and dangerous rocks – it suits the observer, the outsider that even the invited guest feels himself to be.

p. 45:

already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the seachange of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Fitzgerald was an astute observer of a certain breed of young women, social climbers who begin with open hearts and end with emotional bankruptcy. He could be talking about Gilda Gray or Paris Hilton, the story’s the same. The Basil and Josephine Stories paint a picture of such a girl and her counterpart young man, as they both try to find that sharp peak of social victory.

p. 44:

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.

Fitzgerald has built his description of the party over two pages, starting with the music wafting over to the neighbors, laying out details of pickup, preparation and cleaning, describing the food and the orchestra and the bar.  With this sentence, he launches into cosmic connection, keying the turning of the earth to the ramp up to what you think must be the climax of the party, that yellow cocktail music finding just the right shade for twilight tipping into darkness, the cacophony of voices making an opera.  This sentence feels like the snap of a pitcher’s wrist as a fastball leaves his hand and hurtles to the batter.

Well, it certainly invites metaphor anyway, and that’s something I love about reading this book:  it presents such stunningly crafted phrases that your own mind is jarred loose into a way of looking at words that is more creative than you are otherwise capable.

p. 43: 

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.

It’s too easy, perhaps, to pick the first sentence in this chapter, introducing the otherworldly excess of Gatsby’s legendary summer parties.  But I love this simple and plain sentence, it’s like a single pure note that begins a symphony of prose – after this Fitzgerald goes into extensive description of the expense that Gatsby takes to cater to every whim of his spoiled jaded guests.  And it is that note that Nick first hears, before he’s invited, before he attends any event at his neighbor’s estate.  Just that music carried on the warm summer air over to his little cottage sandwiched between mansions, introducing the mystery of wealth on the other side.

p. 42:

When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene – his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.

Shall we take one last look at the party?  Yes, let’s.  That last look – the chaos, the blood, the keening women, and through it all the unquenchable and wholly misguided instinct to maintain some semblance of class.  Again I notice a callback for the first time, the reference to the tacky upholstery first seen on the introduction to the apartment.  The whole scene and this last glance come together in a real and strikingly familiar summation, bleeding fluently.

p. 41:

Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.

An odd choice from this page, but one that is deeper than it seems.  When Mr. McKee is introduced at the start of the party, almost the first detail Nick notices is that the hurried little man has a dab of shaving cream straggling on his cheekbone.  That’s the kind of note that lends an air of authentic observation to the introduction of a new character in a scene, a nice little authorly touch.  But coming back to this hours and pages later is more than a little bit of genius.  It makes all the previous hours and pages that much more real, that the shaving cream really is there, Nick really did notice it, and it bothered him the whole time even though it wasn’t mentioned between the introduction and the point where Nick reaches out to touch a sleeping man’s face.  It shows Nick’s eye for detail and his compulsive need to tidy up the image and reality in the lives of others.  So with this one innocuous sentence, Fitzgerald adds verisimilitude to the party and depth to the characterization of his wonderfully unreliable narrator.

There are flashier sentences on this page, more vibrant description of that hazy party:  ‘People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.’ That’s a party I’ve been to before, and never felt too great about the next day.  And of course there’s the climactic close of the festivities when ‘Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.’ That’ll send ’em home all right.

p. 40:

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.

Nick’s disconnected experience at the party continues here, actually graduates into full disembodiment.  Now he feels both in the moment and outside of it, watching as a curious stranger on the street.  He’s repulsed by the moment he’s living, if not by the life he’s living or rather of life as a whole:  ‘I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.’

Note that this text is from the painstaking restoration that Matthew Bruccoli completed in 1991, working from Fitzgerald’s hand-marked galleys to correct many longstanding errors from the original 1925 publication.  One of the key errors was ‘I saw him too’ rather than ‘I was him too’ – the correct reading emphasizes Nick’s projection of self onto the street bystander.

This whole page is filled with tight bits of prose.  I like the way Nick tries to leave but the ‘wild strident argument’ pulls him back into his chair ‘as if with ropes.’ Also imprinted on my brain is how Myrtle’s warm breath pours the story of her first encounter with Tom, the urgent mantra she repeats on the road to her first affair, ‘You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever.’

p. 38:

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean – then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

In the midst of the long afternoon party, Fitzgerald throws in this little gem, perfectly capturing the way a striking coincidence of visual beauty can take you out of your physical environment for a moment.

I remember walking across the campus at Princeton, lost in thoughts of a cold winter just passed with nothing ventured and nothing earned, thinking about a situation closing in on me like the walls of a slowly collapsing cave.  It was spring but it didn’t feel like it yet, the rains came every day but the water was cold with sickness rather than the warm rain that feeds the earth.  But that morning was a new day, the air still sharp but a clear blue sky suggested that the dew could burn off to reveal real sunlight playing off the grass.  Looking up as I passed McCosh Hall, I saw a square of sky framed in the arched faux window atop the building, a perfect blue that held the whole spring in its depth.  I knew then that winter was over, that as the day continued spring would declare its annual victory . . . then I put my head back down and trudged through the slush that remained on the ground from yesterday’s snowfall.