Gatsby - A Criminal

 I wrote yesterday that I like the trend of mixing genres. (Take a look at Best Books of The 21st Century). When I was younger and I had ambitions of being a writer, my examples were Willaim Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr on one hand and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald on the other. Later came Theodore Dreiser. I could not see what I could write about - I did not have the history of Faulkner, I did not know American expats like Hemingway, I could not match Vonnegut's humor, and I did not think there was anything to the detective genre.

Then I went to prison. A friend suggested that I try writing again. Having sped through my life, I had now come to a full stop for the first time in decades. I realized that I did not like my abandoning writing. There also came to me about the same time that I could not just go through the motions of living but had to stop and stand for something. I started reading again with the intent to fill in the holes of my literary education. A friend suggested I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian opened my eyes with its mixture of the Western and the historical novel and the allegorical. Then came Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. - an alternate history novel. 

Then I started re-reading novels from my youth. One of these was The Great Gatsby. This time I saw it not as another of Fitzgerald's dives into the upper crust of the Jazz Age, but as a crime novel. Jay Gatz is a conman, a criminal.

Matthew Yoon with his all-too-brief discussion of The Great Gatsby, How F. Scott Fitzgerald Uses Characterization to Describe America in the Early 1900s on Literary Yard, does not quite hit the mark of Gatsby's criminality. Still, he does see the novel as exploring Jazz Age society:

By showing their features like the corruption of relationships, the unfair attitude towards women, and materialism through Daisy, Gatsby, and Tom, Fitzgerald uses characterization to describe the facets of America during the Roaring Twenties in the early 1900s.

And is this not what Chandler did for Los Angeles, Ross MacDonald did for a wider area of Southern California and Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels do for African-American Los Angeles? 

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