p. 76:

‘Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.’

Of the six romantically involved characters – Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Nick and Jordan – I’ve always found Jordan the most attractive. Not the most alluring, that would be Daisy. Gatsby, Tom and Nick were too dangerous, stupid and boring in turn. Myrtle had earthy sensuality, but that was about all.

All of these characters are living a lie, each of a different sort, and a couple of those lies will be fatal. But Jordan will emerge almost completely unscathed from this story of betrayal and death. She wears her dishonesty lightly and openly, a casually careless driver in a world of cautious motorists. In a sense, she’s more authentic than her summer friends – she knows who she is, she knows she’s a liar, she doesn’t get lost in the mazes of self-deception that surround the others. She’d never do anything that wasn’t all right … for her.

p. 63:

‘It takes two to make an accident.’

Here is the page where we really get to know Jordan Baker, the other woman at the center of the novel.  Daisy is the one who has become legend, the unforgettable golden girl for whom all was dreamt and all was lost.  But I always liked Jordan better, not least because she is revealed here to be an incurable liar.

When Nick scolds her for being a careless driver, she first lies that she is careful, then lightly insists that she doesn’t have to be careful since other people are.  Nick points out that she’ll be in trouble if she meets someone as careless as herself, and she deftly turns the conversation to their relationship, declaring her affection for solid, careful Nick.

Nick knows this lovely girl is a liar, but ‘Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply – I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.’ Is a thing truly forgotten if it’s remembered well enough to write down later?  Jordan’s not the only one with a loose concept of the truth.  It takes two.

p. 62:

most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning

Here’s another casually sharp insight into human nature.  From time to time, everyone pretends to be something they’re not.  And sometimes this pretense is just a costume, worn as if for a holiday party, to be discarded and forgotten after the festivities of the moment expire.  But sometimes the pretense is aspiration in disguise; the costume turns out to be not a drapery over skin, but a layer emerging from underneath.

p. 57:

‘It was – simply amazing,’ she repeated abstractedly.

What’s amazing to me is that every time I’ve read that sentence before today, I read ‘abstractedly‘ as ‘distractedly‘ – thinking that Jordan was distracted by the hour-long conversation she’s just had with Gatsby.

And what’s really amazing is that Fitzgerald never has an imprecise paragraph or sentence or phrase or even a single slightly improper word choice. He used ‘abstractedly’ because that’s precisely what he meant.  Jordan wasn’t distracted by some diversion or emotion; she was abstracted, lost in thought. I’ve read the word wrong every time and never noticed until I took the time to find the artistry on every line.

A mild note of interest on this page is Jordan’s reference to her aunt, Sigourney. The actress Sigourney Weaver, star of the Alien movies, was born Susan and changed her name after this character, who is only mentioned this once in passing.

p. 55:

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes – there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

A great way to enjoy this sentence is to think of all the worse ways to describe just such a woman.  It wouldn’t be enough to just say that she has natural athletic grace.  It would be pale cliché to call her a swan, a ballerina, a long tall drink of water.  It’s not just that she’s sporty, that she grew up with money, that her cool physicality glows through an evening dress.

She moves “as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.” The magic of this phrase is that it also captures the observer’s social standing, as a man who regards the patrician pastime of golf as a subject of aspiration if not envy.  He knows that the only girls who grow up on golf courses are those who have their cares in the world filtered through a fine inheritance.

p. 54:

‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete.

Among the class distinctions that haunt Fitzgerald, and therefore this novel, is the divide between the straightforward mien of the Midwest and the slick sophistication of the Eastern cities.  Saying exactly what you mean is looked down upon by the city elite, precisely because it is a sign of naivete.  They’d like to think that those with fast minds and agile imaginations prefer to deal in subtleties, inferences and innuendo.  By their logic, only a simpleton prefers the simple truth.

But beneath the distaste for truth is the fear that an honest opinion is unpopular, or that plain words would reveal their own ignorance.  For they were all newcomers to the city once, and they escaped the mark of the rube by hiding in obfuscations, hedging their way through false sophistication.  Urbanity is just a mask to hide your true face.

A rarity here, possibly unintentional, is the wordplay in “an urban distaste for the concrete.” Cities are made from concrete, couldn’t be built without it – just as society couldn’t survive without the hard facts, however unfashionable they may be.

All that said, the generalization that Jordan proceeds into is a classic:  ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’

p. 49:

a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree.

Something about this description assures us that the violence is ultimately impotent, befitting of the stunted ambition sure to envelop the undegrad later that night.