p. 12:

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling – and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

Good God. Can anyone write like that anymore? Has anyone else ever written like this? I’ve heard the novel described as more than prose, as one long poem. And that’s how it feels for me: I’ve never been able to have a deep appreciation for modern poetry – yeah I’m one of those troglodytes who likes their poetry to rhyme – but “prose” seems too plain a word for the magic weaved into these words.

I also love the description of our first look at Daisy and Jordan, “both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” When the windows are closed, “the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.” Lovely.

p. 11:

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

Possibly the most memorable description of a residential lawn in all of literature. I find it just oddly breathtaking. It’s incredibly cinematic – like a long, graceful tracking shot in a movie – and this was written in 1924, I don’t think any movie had a tracking shot like this yet. Fitzgerald has a cinematographer’s eye, the visions in his head flow out into his prose – it’s not surprising he tried his hand at screenwriting late in his career. Read it again, let your mind become the disembodied camera swooping over the lawn, the sundials and brick, the fiery colors of the gardens, and up, up, up the walls with the green vines. Amazing, isn’t it?

p. 10:

I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires

Nick lives in a little cottage wedged in between colossal mansion properties. It’s an eyesore, but small enough to be overlooked.

Some people can’t stand to be around success if they’re not as successful. Displays of vast wealth curdle their souls into shriveled envy. Fitzgerald wasn’t always rich, but he always thrived on simply being in the presence of moneyed aristocracy, it made him feel more whole even as he envied their birthright. It’s an odd and very interesting reaction to wealth. Most people either view incredible wealth as impractically out of reach, and so not worth troubling about – or outrageously unfair, as if any reasonable notion of fairness promised all of us the same financial station in life. Fitzgerald seemed to believe that being around wealth was a warm blanket of comfort in itself, independent of whether he’d ever belong in that stratosphere.

This page also introduces Tom Buchanan, as the former college star athlete who reached “such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything else savours of anti-climax” – poor Tom would “drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” A perfect portrait of the jock after his glory days are far behind him.

p. 9:

This isn’t just an epigram – life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

There are many life lessons in the novel that are passed over in a sentence or two. Nick had set out in his new life in New York, to become “that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded’ man.” Talented young men always meet life believing they can excel in all meaningful aspects, only to find that not only is the goal inaccessible, but the chase is unrewarding and draining. Fitzgerald recites the epigram, says it’s more than just that, and then leaves it at that. There’s a whole ‘nother untold novel in that sentence.

Also on this page, I love the poetic reduction of Long Island geography into “that slender riotous island” and “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound” with the “the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast” between West Egg and East Egg. The North Shore passed into literary legend on this page and has never been as glamorous since.

p: 8:

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

Newly settled in at West Egg, Nick feels lonely until another man, more lost than he, asks for directions and Nick answers easily. And that’s it, that’s all it takes not to be the new guy anymore. This is a powerful idea, that you are lost until you can provide guidance to one more lost than you. I don’t think Fitzgerald meant it in a particularly spiritual or compassionate way, but it’s always struck me as something that’s important to remember in this light: the helplessness of others is an unintended gift to you, and you fail to avail yourself of this bounty if you do not give the best of what you have.

The only other phrase on this page that comes close for me is the way Nick’s new books on finance “stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint.” I often think of the books on my shelf the same way, not just the ones on finance, but all of them – treasures that flash and gleam underneath their dusty spines, needing only their covers to be opened to reveal their endless reward.

p. 7:

I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.

Nick nonchalantly mentions that he was a soldier in the Great War – which was only called World War I later, when the world realized there was a World War II. Half a sentence, that’s all that we hear about his participation in the largest armed conflict mankind had ever seen. And then he spouts this offhand line about his time in Europe and the dislocation he felt on returning home.

This is one of the few lines I enjoy fully only for knowing something about Fitzgerald’s life. It was one of his great puerile regrets that he never fought in the war. I forget why this undesired fortune befell him – maybe it was just timing, he was still in basic training, or possibly he developed some medical condition that kept him stateside. But he was always envious of men who went to war and were therefore more manly, more worldly. So while it’s possible that this sentence is a fine encapsulation of gently repressed post-traumatic stress, authentically felt by actual veterans of the time – it’s more likely that it’s a romantic projection of how Fitzgerald imagines he would have felt had he actually gone to hell and come back a better man for it.

If not for the biographical enjoyment, I would have picked “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” Beautiful.