Banned Book Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’

I have nev­er been a fan of books detail­ing the lives of char­ac­ters I con­sid­er vapid and use­less, so I gen­er­al­ly have avoid­ed them. In recent years, I’ve come to see that atti­tude as wrong, most­ly because the var­i­ous authors are actu­al­ly say­ing some­thing important.

My step­son remind­ed me that the absolute ele­gance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose in his clas­sic work, The Great Gatsby, is, for him at least, what makes the book great, and I agree. Just two exam­ples: “Reserving judge­ments is a mat­ter of infi­nite hope.” “In his blue gar­dens men and girls came and went like moths among the whis­per­ings and the cham­pagne and the stars.”

Nick Carroway is the nar­ra­tor of the tale, and we observe the unfold­ing sequence of events along­side him. The pro­tag­o­nists’ list here could be con­sid­ered longish, but to my mind, it con­sists pri­mar­i­ly of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, with the “female leads” (Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson) seem­ing, in behav­ior at least, to be more sec­ondary, more tools to push the two men into action.

This is a book about elit­ism, infi­deli­ty, denial, and avarice. The author does an excel­lent job of paint­ing a liv­ing por­trait, in which each of those faults is graph­i­cal­ly limned, with the details fill­ing in those out­lines as the sto­ry moves forward.

To my mind, the author also accu­rate­ly illu­mi­nates the old max­im that mon­ey can­not buy hap­pi­ness. No one in The Great Gatsby seems par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tent with life, despite not hav­ing any finan­cial hardships.

The end of the tale has its shock val­ue, and while there is cer­tain­ly a “moral to the sto­ry,” it nev­er­the­less does not feel preachy or pedan­tic, most­ly because we are observ­ing events indi­rect­ly, through Nick’s eyes.

The Great Gatsby has been cen­sored due to lan­guage, vio­lence, and sex­u­al ref­er­ences, as well as its unapolo­getic por­tray­al of the “American dream” as deeply flawed and super­fi­cial. Most attempts to absolute­ly ban it have failed, yet it remains a con­tro­ver­sial book for some high school libraries.

The Great Gatsby is avail­able at the Clark County Public Library in book and dig­i­tal form. It can be pur­chased at most book­stores or online from Bookshop.org, a con­ve­nient way to buy books and sup­port inde­pen­dent booksellers.