For a long time, whenever someone asked
me what my favorite book was (an occupational hazard of being a book
critic is that people ask this question a lot) I had an immediate and
simple answer: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My love affair with Gatsby
started early; I probably read it for the first time when I was 11 or
12 and read it again every year until I was in my 20s. Yes, I was a
precocious reader, but I also had a good reason for diving into Gatsby.
Fitzgerald had lived in the town where I grew up—West Egg in the book,
Great Neck on the map—and used the town as the setting for his 1925
book. Great Neck in the 1920s was a playground for writers, actors, and
other luminaries: Fitzgerald ended up there at the recommendation of his
friend and mentor Ring Lardner, and other boldfaced names had homes in
the pretty town on the north shore of Long Island just across the Queens
county line. The town had definitely lost its glamour by the time I
grew up, but it had the things that make people like my parents want to
raise families there: excellent schools, an easy commute, and an air of
easy affluence which carried over from Fitzgerald’s era. And Great Neck
was proud of its literary history: there was even a short-lived
restaurant called Great Scott! in the center of town when I was a child.
Picking up the book again, now that a lot of my critical writing is about crime, I see Gatsby in a new, noir light. The incursion of noir themes into the book makes contemporaneous sense: Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon only five years later in 1930, and the magazines like Black Mask where
many noir writers got their starts were already extant. Though the
heyday of American noir was in the economically depressed 1930s and the
war-ridden 1940s (which is also when the term noir was coined),
Fitzgerald presciently wove many noir elements into the book that would
be his greatest success. A simple definition of noir holds that the hero
is morally compromised and haunted by the past—that’s the book’s
protagonist, Jay Gatsby, without question—and that crime will be an
element of the story. That’s Gatsby too. Gatsby also
works with novelist Laura Lippman’s wonderful summation of noir, a world
where “dreamers become schemers.” Jay Gatsby, like his creator, is both
dreamer and schemer. Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled
rather than hardboiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling. ... [mehr] https://crimereads.com/the-dark-and-dreamy-noir-of-the-great-gatsby/
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