p. 66:

Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand.

We are in the midst of two full pages in which Fitzgerald does nothing but reel off the guest list for Gatsby’s summer parties.  The first few times I read the novel, I barely skimmed these pages, not understanding the impact Fitzgerald was delivering with the sheer volume and baroque detail of the list.  Sprinkled throughout the fanciful names, there are these phrases that contain whole worlds, stories within stories, mysteries, comedies and crimes.  Why would a man’s hair turn “cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all“?  A man came “only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden” – did he come just to fight? What was a bum doing at this fancy estate party? How does it feel to have a brother so notorious that you can only be referenced as “brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife“?

But of course, my featured one-sentence story here involves jail, drunkenness, and maiming.  There is something very subtle here that shows Fitzgerald knows about passing out drunk:  writers without experience in this matter would describe what the man was doing just before he passed out.  Fitzgerald, being an unrepentant drunk himself, knew that a drunk never knows what he was doing in those moments.  He only knows the next day about the consequences, and only knows that because he was told by witnesses who are only barely more reliable than himself.

p. 65:

the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him

Nick reels off a list of over 70 names of people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer.  Both narrator and author sense that the sheer volume of names will give more color than any generalities of crowd description.  These visitors descended upon Gatsby’s lawns and gossiped about their host while getting drunk on his hospitality, they came to be part of the scene, they paid him a subtle and damning and damnable tribute in caring more about the idea of Gatsby than about the actual person.

p. 61:

I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.

Nick reveals a lot about himself by how little he explains about his life outside his own definition of the story.  On this page, he’s trying to convince us that his summer in New York wasn’t dominated by all things Gatsby.  A short “affair” (whatever that means, in his day) might be cause for several pages or even a chapter in a more conventional account of Nick’s life.  But this sentence is all he says about the girl, because he isn’t here to tell you about himself, the ostensible story is supposed to belong to Gatsby.

But I’m curious.  Just what does an affair mean to Nick?  What sense of honor or cowardice allows a “mean look” to alter his pleasurable pursuits, whether frivolous or serious?  Is the description “blow quietly away” an accurate account from the perspective of our Jersey girl?

None of this gets any exploration.  Instead, later down the page Nick devotes a substantial narrative to an aimless fantasy of following a romantic woman in his mind’s eye.  She’s a New Yorker – he begins his account with a statement familiar to all transplants to the big city:  ‘I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.‘

As he goes on to imagine what it would be like to spot a woman in the crowd on Fifth Avenue and follow her home for nothing more than a smile, we realize that this romantic fantasy captures the essence of what he wants but didn’t get from Ms. Jersey City.  He gave the real “girl” a cursory sentence, and devoted a fulsome paragraph to a fantasy woman – and in that contrast told us more about himself with omission than he could have with description.

p. 60:

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

I love the energy ascribed here to emptiness, a concept that is ordinarily quiet and passive.  Here the emptiness is a kinetic force that fills the house and overflows out the windows and doors, so powerful that it blankets Gatsby in a protective cocoon.

Another wild party is over, and the host stands in the doorway alone, with his true mission still incomplete – the girl of his fevered dreams didn’t come.  He’s chased her across years without seeing her, other than in his boundless imagination.  Now she’s just across the bay, and surely she must see his mansion alight with festivity, night after night, a beacon calling to her to come and join him at last.  But she doesn’t come this night, and all the people and music and laughter that evening have only fed the emptiness which now fills the house and his heart.

p. 58:

He smiled – and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it so all the time.

Have you ever met someone with this degree of charisma?  You’d know it if you had.  The magnetic pull that a person like this can exert upon you is mesmerizing, lulling you into a warm fuzz of contentment, willing you to believe whatever is in the moment.  This is much more subtle than the shock and awe of a motivational speaker for desperate losers; it’s a slow, singular seduction from which no one can claim full immunity.  It’s more pleasant than powerful and therefore less resistable.