A Century Later, Tom and Daisy Are Still Ruining Our Lives

A conversation about Jay Gatsby and other careless people

Since April of 1925, The Great Gatsby¹ has sold 30 million copies, which places it in the same bestseller echelon as Gone with the Wind, The Hunger Games, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, Valley of the Dolls, and, ironically, How to Win Friends and Influence People. What sets Gatsby inarguably apart from these other books is that it was also a total commercial flop — at least in comparison with the author’s previous novels. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, Gatsby was out of print, and his last royalty check was for $13.13.

Strangely, Fitzgerald has the Second World War to thank for the novel’s posthumous popularity. As Louis Menand III wrote in The Free World, “the so-called paperback revolution is misnamed.” Paperback books had existed since the sixteenth century. What most people refer to as the “paperback revolution” was not about production, but about distribution:

Before the Second World War the biggest problem in the book business was bookstores. There were not enough of them. Bookstores were clustered in big cities and college towns, and many were really gift shops with a few volumes for sale. Publishers sold much more of their product by mail order and through book clubs, distribution systems that provide pretty much the opposite of what most people consider a fun shopping experience

But in 1939, Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books, “the first American mass-market paperback line,” which “transformed the industry.” Key to “mass-market” was having access to a mass market, and with “only 2,800 bookstores,” the prospects of selling around “180 million books” were pretty grim. But, Menand goes on, there were “more than 7,000 newsstands, 18,000 cigar stores, 58,000 drugstores, and 62,000 lunch counters — not to mention train and bus stations.” The enormous success of this model — “Paperbacks increased the market for serious literature by a factor of a hundred. They increased the market for popular fiction by a factor of a thousand” — encouraged publishers to collaborate on “Armed Services Editions of popular titles — paperbound double-columned books, trimmed to a size that slipped easily into the pocket of a uniform and could be thrown away after use.” These were “distributed free of charge to the sixteen million men and women who served during the war.” Gatsby was one of these titles, and during the war over 150,000 copies were sent to soldiers on duty. The novel’s popularity among military personnel prompted a critical revival, which helped turn Gatsby into what it is today: in terms of sales, the fourth² most commercially successful work of American literature.

Since we’re in “great American novel” territory whenever Gatsby comes up — it is, alongside Moby-Dick, the eternal contender — I wanted to roll around in it for a while. I reread it earlier this year, relishing nearly every page. As it turns out, The Great Gatsby is a pretty good fucking book. But I’m only a reader, and Gatsby is so at the heart of American literature that it’s on more or less every high school syllabus (for now). Because of his essay, “The Great American Bummer,” I decided to reach out to Danny Maloney, a former teacher at a high school in Philadelphia, to talk about, as it turns out, one of his favorite books.

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PN: Returning to Gatsby for the first time since 2006, I was struck by how many of the characters’ relationships are determined or shadowed by war — and not only the war, but war as a general concept. On the second page or so, Nick, the novel’s narrator, reflects on his desire for a prolonged world “in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” His service in France seems to have elevated or heightened or sharpened his understanding of the world, and only Gatsby, he realizes, had the same “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” It reminded me of something Erich Fromm points out in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, that wartime is a suspension of capitalist nihilism, that soldiers on the same side can be brothers and care for one another instead of compete with one another. Do you think this is something Fitzgerald was going for, this idea of war as a suspension of or relief from normal relationships? Particularly at one of the nation’s most famously “business friendly” periods?

DM: I wonder how much of it he looked at the war as this actual suspension of certain conditions, or this condition that affects perspective and maybe suspends — perhaps permanently — certain beliefs. “Relief” doesn’t feel like the right emotional response to that regardless. On one hand, the war (and its temporarily equalizing effects) certainly affects Gatsby’s worldview. The equalizing effect of the uniform enables Gatsby not only to meet Daisy, but also Nick (who can introduce him to Daisy for round two). So yes, war does briefly suspend the social rigidity (or at least the belief in its power) that would have likely made intimacy impossible. However, can we say that the suspension of beliefs in the power of class (something  that might have kept Gatsby from Daisy apart in 1913) creates relief? I don’t think so. I think most of my former students would be able to say that Fitzgerald comes down pretty harshly on a conservative American society that doesn’t want to change at the rate some of the strivers in the novel desire or believe possible. But that critique doesn’t change the reality of the belief that society has changed is not only false, it’s dangerously delusional. For that, I’d turn to the Valley of Ash described in Chapter 2, which I’ve always read (and used to teach) as an allusion to the trenches.

PN: Yes! Queens as “the wastes” of Belgium.

DM: Right, this place filled with “the ash-grey men” who “swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight,” and defined by a harsh monotony (interrupted only by incredible acts of violence — Myrtle's death in a ditch on the side of the road). And Fitzgerald’s use of dust and vision in this space, I think, can lead us to think about how spaces of war/poverty can affect us. I used to tell students to think about the “impenetrable clouds” that obscure certain characters.

But it’s also clear that Fitzgerald thinks that some of the shifted vision of the war isn’t necessarily always bad. For what it’s worth, I think one of the initial hints of Nick’s unreliability is that a few paragraphs after claim about desiring “moral attention” and uniform stability, he admits that the “delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War” created this restlessness in him that leads him, among other things, to abandon home and a somewhat ambiguous engagement for a profession he knows nothing about. But in a novel that really celebrates movement and migration, I think Fitzgerald looks at this as a net positive. Splashy Lost Generation Writers iconically go to Paris, but Fitzgerald’s characters go to the east coast. In this case, suspending a belief about the superiority of home might be a relief to Fitzgerald. But the difference between necessary relief and dangerous delusion is obviously one of the ways the novel demarcates between classes.

PN: On that subject — the migration of Fitzgerald’s characters — the Midwest is there in a lot of his work. It serves as a kind of witness, or even a stern figure of authority, shaking its head at the characters’ — and maybe the author’s — ambitions. It’s easy to forget that, in the final pages of Gatsby, Wisconsin and Minnesota take up a lopsided amount of space. Here, Nick sees “the real snow, our snow, [which] began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows… We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour.” That, he says, is “my Middle West.” Shortly afterward, he realizes that “this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” There are allusions here to costume or disguise — one that nonetheless won’t fool the easterners for long. What do you think is going on here?

DM: So, in that passage, Fitzgerald frames the Middle West is a place where you can be unaware of identity, which is very interesting in a novel all about new identities and fake personas and changed names. The East is hyperconscious of identity and differentiating identity, particularly in regard to new people — and especially when whiteness is on the line. Think of the Queensboro Bridge scene where, as Gatsby and Nick drive into New York, Fitzgerald is offering these very specific descriptions of the appearances and performances of minority groups driving into New York. I think in Fitzgerald’s mythological Middle West, whiteness and class are pretty easy to defend. You can be careless in ensuring your power is maintained and threats to it are excluded from your circle. But, that type of carelessness doesn’t work in the urban East where there’s not just more people but more types of people. The East Coast elites have to be vigilant and categorical in your level of identity — those south-eastern Europeans are not white; the wealth you see from the chauffeured car of rich Black Americans is not real wealth, and so on.

PN: At the end of chapter six, Gatsby tells Nick about the origin of his obsession with Daisy — a “love” that began five years prior to the events of the novel, and which culminates in a kiss. Then Nick tells us something strange — another of the novel’s mysteries: “I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of started air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” What do you make of this? What is the rhythm in Gatsby’s story? — in his voice? What’s so fugitive about it?

DM: Can I just say, how gorgeous is that line? I remember reading that line out loud to students because I thought it was so perfect, and I wouldn’t want them to miss a single word of it. There are actually a lot of lost words in Gatsby. At the end, Nick scratches out some foul words on Gatsby’s stoop (but we never know what). One of my favorite details of the novel is that Daisy mumbles so much to make people lean in, out of fear of missing a single intoxicating comment. I used to ask students what it said about a person who deliberately talks low like that, or what it says that Nick focuses on it. Sometimes, I’ve always wondered if that was Fitzgerald’s nudge to ensure we’re reading his baby closely.

Rereading it now, that passages seems like one more way to pair the sacred with the profane. When I started teaching this novel, I was working at a Catholic school, and there’s a Catholic reading of Gatsby that’s not totally uncompelling (Gatsby as Christ figure (a term paper warhorse), an obsession with color iconography, a type of strident morality), and there are many readings of Fitzgerald as a lapsed catholic. And in that story which Nick recounts, where Gatsby literally ascends the staircase of the sidewalk to kiss Daisy’s white face — something that Fitzgerald calls an incarnation — I don’t think it’s inappropriate to think of the real spiritual power of language that Catholicism preaches, the Word made flesh and all that.

There’s a sense in the novel that, unless we have the language for something, it’s not real and it has no future. Consider the shock Gatsby has when he’s forced to confront the realities of Daisy’s marriage — that is, when her daughter comes up and starts speaking to her. What else seems so dependent on the right language? Well, the past for one — not just of individuals but of whole societies. There’s a sense that the metaphysical also depends on the right words — and I think this is just as powerful and potent today. If we lose the language to capture our most profound qualities (or even if that language is atrophied to our most immature concepts of love, self, the spirit), we really do lose something. I think this is part of the genuine moral panic around our addiction to the digital world where language is shallow, poor, or nonexistent, and whether our fragmented attention takes us away from something deep. Once certain things are lost, will they be incommunicable forever?

PN: I love that — language as confirmation, as reifying. To elaborate on its power in the novel, can we talk about its prose for a second? Fitzgerald’s style cuts like there are fleurs-de-lis hammered into the blade. Of a summer evening, he says, “The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.” A townhouse in Manhattan is “one slice in a long white cake.” There’s a brief shift to the present tense at one point to describe the shifting actions of a city afternoon as it blurs into evening, quick is strikingly contemporary. And then of course there’s the ending, which is hard to beat in American fiction:

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

DM: I think one of the fascinating things about Gatsby’s sacrosanct place in the American curriculum is that, for such a widely taught book, its prose is very modern. It’s not the most Modernist thing you’ll encounter, but there are lines of real poetry and even experimentation. It’s got so much depth. I’m often startled by how such a beautiful novel is so casually taught — maybe because I was never taught Gatsby. I read it in high school and then later in college but I really never paid attention to the novel until I had to teach it, which is always a fascinating exercise. First, because I think this novel — which has a lot to do with aging and maturity (or the lack of maturity that accompanies aging) — really benefits from perspective. But it’s also because when I taught something, it was a matter of reading it multiple times, and seeking for a bunch of little “theses” that I could find in it. My annotated Gatsby copies (plural) are written all over in these unintelligible scrawls of what I find interesting or how I thought I would capture students’ imaginations. I thought of planning a unit like writing a multi-part critical essay in which I would “argue” for my students (something to fight against always works well in a class). And fortunately, I was able to shift and change things because every time I read the novel (at least once a year) I find something new. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a crazily gorgeous line I missed.

There’s an airiness that perfumes the novel. I think of that image of Daisy floating on the couch in Chapter 1. So much of the prose is that way — central to the success of the novel as a work of art, but so effervescent. The problem with talking about Gatsby is so much of discussion seems cliché. Most of us get a half-baked high-school version of something that’s actually remarkably complex. Here’s an easy example: the way Fitzgerald uses color is staggering, synesthetic and confusing and wonderful all at once. But because you remember the Green Light, talking about how colorful Fitzgerald’s prose is feels childish — literally. But then you get to a line like “yellow cocktail music,” and somehow I have no idea what that means but I know precisely how it sounds.

I loved teaching Gatsby in part for these stylistic reasons. It does all these complex structural things not only artfully, but approachably — in a way that can be understood. It’s not that it’s basic or stupid, but it allows you to access it on whatever level you want. You can choose not to think much at all, and you’ll probably be like that corporate lawyer I spoke to a few weeks ago who just talked about it as “a novel about rich people.” But Fitzgerald’s prose creates these layers that readers (and students) can delve deeper and deeper depending on how much they want from the novel. And I don’t think Fitzgerald did that intentionally, but it’s unique for a popular text to have so many levels of access. I think that’s why it’s so gratifying to teach. It lends itself to certain levels of accessibility that students can genuinely and independently identify how motif works. Most people want to feel smart (I think), and the novel allows people to access smart literary things for a wide range of readers.

PN: That’s something I’ve been curious about, especially lately. How, in your experience, did students respond to Gatsby? If you read the Atlantic you know that the youngs are morons who can’t read without keeping a moral score, but it would shock me if that’s actually the case out in the wild. So — particularly with Fitzgerald’s antisemitism — what does that look like in the classroom?

DM: First of all, I think the dirtiest word in English education is “relatable.” If the literature we are teaching is aligned and relatable to teenagers — whose minds were addled long before they became addicted to algorithmic social media and discouraged by toxic national politics, by the way — then we are offering so little. I understood my job as a way to offer students something beyond. That’s why I learned to love reading — not because I saw myself³ as I was, but precisely because I saw adult possibilities that were like nothing I saw in life. It helped me realize I could escape or aspire or consider as much as I wanted.

An unintentional benefit of our current political moment is that students are increasingly well versed in the implications of an unfairly wealthy and irresponsible elite class. I don’t think we were thinking that way when I was in high school. So I think this has made understanding “old money and new money” a little easier. Class is not always the easiest thing to explain when you have to get more complex than just “how much money is in your checking account,” but, to our credit, I think we’re talking about it a lot more, so teachers are better equipped to think about it and define it and students have more a scaffold for it. But here’s the thing: that understanding of elitism is often shallow because it comes from infographics and Instagram carousels and TikToks, which — shockingly, I know — cannot provide you with a sophisticated sense of class consciousness. I think the same thing can be said for their ability to decipher some of the more sinister bigotry and racism and antisemitism in the novel. I think to a more sophisticated reader (or an older reader with a larger vocabulary of slurs and biases), you read through the Wolfsheim passages or depictions of any non-rich WASP and you’re slightly horrified. But more horrifying is trying to explain what it means to a room of teenagers who might ask an innocuous question. Their moral outrage is, for the most part, only equipped to deal with the obvious and the contemporary.

However, a brief word in defense of the young and their moralizing reading: The moral outrage (or mere unwillingness to accommodate certain things in literature) did occasionally pop up toward the last years of my career, but never to the point where a student wouldn’t engage with a text. They just might become unwilling to defend it or “like” it. And often, they had a point. I think we’ve sometimes become accustomed to dealing with some biases so long that even when we don’t condone them, we’ve lost an appreciation for their edge, and it’s helpful for adolescent outrage to remind you of some perspective, even if it’s misplaced and sometimes ill-informed, or just reactionary.

PN: I want to chase that a little — the sinister part anyway. Tom, too, is bored with money and success: his ventures into white supremacy seem, to Nick, “pathetic” — “as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.” Later, “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.” The contemporary parallels here — men like Musk and Zuckerberg whose incomprehensible fortunes are no longer enough, and who demand to be adored as well as feared — are almost too easy to point out. Fitzgerald himself craved the security of money. Do you think Gatsby was a kind of conversation he had with himself about the potential folly of this kind of craving? Is Jay Gatsby a warning?

DM: I think Gatsby is obviously a warning, but I think it’s ultimately a warning against the simplistic ways we understand wealth (and the performance of wealth). And I think that’s one way the novel is timely — as wealth becomes more concentrated and our ways of understanding it (the “one percent,” the economic “elites”) become flattened and memeified, I think the novel really suggests we need to ensure our understanding of wealth to be as complex as the systems of capital that enable them. It’s too simple and maybe even silly to suggest that Fitzgerald looks at money as this evil thing that serves no purpose, perhaps because he can’t let himself look at his own pursuit of it in that same way.

As an (ex-) teacher I think this also really helpful because I think it demands that we ask our students to consider the ways they understand the system are incomplete, and that we must work to get beyond our simplistic notions. Money performs a valuable role in the novel — and not just greasing the justice system to get Tom and Daisy off scot-free. Money can also be fun and comfortable and pleasurable, and that seems like a worthy end — with some caveats. If we just suggest Gatsby is some sort of party flapper novel, we’ve lost our minds to a Baz Luhrmann fantasy, but I think these details of money enabling luxurious pleasures should be taken seriously.

The clearest warning I see in the novel is admittedly a tepid cliché (though that doesn’t make it untrue; perhaps it’s cliché because it’s in Gatsby). Fitzgerald seems harshest when people look at money as something that it’s not: emotionally fulfilling, proof of a fictional meritocracy, an easy solution. His problem seems to be when money’s pleasure or ease gets conflated into something else, particularly as something that gives and/or reflects value. And although the trope that “money doesn’t buy happiness” is played out, I think the novel does stand the test of time because American society is constantly evolving its language and ideas about what money can do (or even what money is — cf. Citizens United). After all, most outside the far right wouldn’t explicitly state some sort of Protestant Work Ethic proof of redemption, but I think finding people to argue with over what we consider a meritocracy is far more complicated. Most high schoolers would say yeah, money won’t buy happiness, but they also think that achieving a level of success at “influencing” would be proof of their taste (which is often used to moralize), would give them freedom (power), and would connect them to a real social network of people who admire them (love).

Similarly, I think Musk and Zuckerberg genuinely view their money (they would probably call it their “success”) as legitimate proof of deserving of our emotional adulation, and also that they are well equipped to meddle in government. We’re already seeing the consequences of that hubris. To believe money is more than it is can be a swaggering, even adolescently narcissistic mindset.

I believe this is related to one of the reasons the book gets an unfair rap as English class fodder. Fitzgerald explicitly casts these desires for wealth and beliefs around money as not only simplistic, but as adolescent (both Tom and Gatsby are introduced in terms of their college years), and so when we teach it to adolescents, they don’t see always see the clear critique — that certain beliefs (true love, social mobility, the infinite capacity of self-performance) are maybe unavoidable in your teens, but pathetic once you still hold them at thirty (or older). Are we still doing this? They’re too close to it. It’s similar to how young men respond to adults performing an adolescent masculinity. To them, it’s not a pathetic attempt to stoop to their level in order to gain their favor, but an egotistical recognition (something they’ve been trained to do by the very apps Musk and Zuckerberg own). Tom and Gatsby are pathetic when they genuinely believe this simplistic/adolescent view — and so are our technocrats.

PN: On that subject, the new exposé about Facebook is called Careless People — a phrase you can’t hear without thinking of Tom and Daisy, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Careless People is a fitting title for a book about the “move fast and break things” company, especially one whose greatest impact, so far, has been to foment a genocide in Myanmar simply because that’s what the algorithms calculated as most profitable. Framing it this way, I realized there’s a third careless person in the novel: Jay Gatsby. It’s his desperation and vulnerability, his need to not only be liked, but loved, that lead him to ruin. His dream — to be with Daisy — is shockingly dull and boring. As a character, all the vitality drains right out of him whenever Daisy is around; he falls quiet and his charisma disappears. Do you think Jordan Baker is correct? Does it really take two to make a car accident?

DM: Oh, Jordan’s absolutely right, and we should take heed. This is obvious, but important, so I’ll spell it out: The wealthy have the privilege of carelessness due to the fact that their wealth insulates them from legal or social recourse. The fact that this remains so relevant and basic should be crushing to us. One imagines that it’s not merely that Daisy is able to avoid the law, but she’s also able to remain ignorant or uncaring of her actions (think of Elon and DOGE and their lack of interaction with the public they’re harming, the lives they’re ruining). But I think the carelessness angle goes so much further. Because I think the extension of your line of thought about Gatsby and Daisy (or Nick and Jordan) as mutually or symbiotically careless, is that the accidents borne from carelessness take two: Meta, for example, and us. We are careless in our use of these technologies, enabling them to take over our lives — especially as we continue to engage despite knowing so much. I don’t know one person who would tell me Meta is good, and yet nearly every person I know has some excuse for continuing to engage with its products, including me. If that’s not careless, what is?

You already discussed the idea of wealth as this complicated aspiration — something that we criticize even as we want it. This gets mirrored on so many levels — Gatsby’s disdain for Tom but his attempt to become him, Fitzgerald’s disdain for his characters but his shameless mining of his own embarrassed desires, and our criticism of them all. And that seems fairly base level. Similarly base level seems the Sparknotable critique of the wealthy as these apathetic agents of disaster. Fitzgerald makes that explicit. But isn’t it interesting how we don’t necessarily give the novel credit for connecting these ideas — how the careless admiration or attention to careless wealthy individuals is leading us to thoughtlessly pursue lives that we understand are fraught, but somehow uncritically think we’ll be immune from?

I think your identification of his dream and his personality as, well, pathetic, is also important. If wealth yields carelessness, what does that carelessness lead to beyond violence and apathy toward the working class? Well, it leads to an emptiness of emotional connection (again, see Jordan and Nick). But it also leads to this total flattening of a personality and potential. When we thoughtlessly offer admiration to certain people, that can yield consequences — particularly if we don’t pay attention. This is one of the ways that social media is most damaging: the people it directs our attention toward are obviously those most in line with its empty ethos; it rewards those who play by its rules.

PN: Right, the ones who conform most frictionlessly to its style.

DM: Exactly. But the influencer is profoundly unworthy not just because they’ve flattened themselves to a godless media, but because they can in fact successfully influence us to be as flat to them, and to lessen our “capacity for wonder.” I’m so often struck by how dull and empty and just sad most influencers I’ve met in the wild are. If we allow algorithms or our own laziness to flatten our lives, that invites a spiritual consequence. But of course, algorithmic social media benefits from us developing this lessened capacity and careless following, so it does everything in its power to use these influencers to continue fostering its ideas in us.

Like so many things in the novel, I think there’s this reminder that the rules don’t evenly apply to everyone. The rich can have poor models of admiration or carelessly create violence, but the system protects them. If the system is not properly structured (which is inevitable with a massively careless public), then those protections can be extended to those who conform to its values. I think that’s what we’ve already started to see with MAGA elites, who can be as careless as they want. Their violence (and literal insurrections) go unpunished. Not so much for the grassroots folks.

I think this is important to reflect to students particularly as the performance of lifestyle, or “self branding,” grows more and more intrinsic to economic mobility (or mere survival). All attitudes are not created equal, and what benefits one will not necessarily benefit others. Gatsby lives in this world of pure performance where certain elements of identity just don’t matter. The fact is, he’s a criminal masquerading as a rich man, but his performance of wealth doesn’t seem all that different from Tom’s reality. Nick, on the other hand, could never be Gatsby; he simply doesn’t have the temperament. Is this why he flees the East? Depressingly, the novel shows how, when we engage in a society that is all flash and no substance, the attempt itself becomes hard to avoid; the society’s values begin to replace our own. Not everyone has the will to resist.

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1. Praising another dead guy, two weeks in a row? What is this, the senate? (Sorry)

2. The first is Catcher in the Rye, the second Lolita, and the third To Kill a Mockingbird; and yes, Lolita is American literature

3. DM: By the way, here’s a classic student question: Is Nick gay for Gatsby? This homosexual former educator says no. But, is Nick gay? Maybe? As I’ve gotten gayer, my gay lens has inevitably been honed. But I don’t think it’s the queer hope for visibility that makes me pause when Nick wakes up from a blackout with a half-naked man in bed. A queer nerd can find all these little gay sentences that, put together, make the novel sound like a Holleran epic set in the Roaring Twenties. But the more I read about Nick’s romances, and the way he just engages with these parties, it feels a little queer. Some readers just have trouble with any man feeling so much love for another man. And I am obviously not alone in my thoughts that it’s interesting, socially, that we can’t understand male affection and extreme loyalty and love outside of homosexuality. There are times when students — especially progressive students — would try to get me to take some big gay stance on Gatsby (or another character), and I just wouldn’t take the bait because I think the social limitation of our inability to express affection and love outside of a romantic/sexual sense is a flaw that need not be mirrored in literature. However, if we want to read Nick as queer, it does become a useful cipher for thinking through the way he’s able to read the world, and how he admires others who have that same ability. My first mentor teacher really liked the description in that opening salvo of Gatsby admiration in the first chapter, that his responsiveness was like “one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away,” and I hadn’t really thought of it much until this rereading. I can’t remember why he loved it. What precisely does that mean, and why does Nick think it’s so important? Is it about modernity or technology or a lack of humanity? This time, I just felt so struck that this responsiveness is not only the only the first trait that Nick expounds upon but that it’s described with a precision of code-switching that feels different when you layer on the narrator’s potential queerness.