No one can throw a summer bash like Jay Gatsby. For a stylish page-turner, why not dip back into Fitzgerald’s 'The Great Gatsby,' a classic tale of indulgence and spirit during a sweltering season in the Roaring ’20s.
in the summer—hot, hazy, the streets steaming—calls for nothing so much as a garden party. At least that’s what Jay Gatsby, the mysteriously moneyed protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-loved novel, “The Great Gatsby,” might say. “By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived,” Fitzgerald writes of one of Gatsby’s famous bashes.
Fans of the book praise Fitzgerald’s ability to capture the instability and malaise of the interwar period. He is also, perhaps, our best chronicler of parties. In Fitzgerald’s world, merrymaking matters. The ostentatious gatherings in “The Great Gatsby,” first published in 1925, are shot through with a sense of possibility: Who knows who you might meet?
When Gatsby’s neighbor, Nick Carraway, who also serves as the book’s narrator, attends his first shindig next door, he observes guests who are “agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.” Gatsby has his own motives. Perhaps his long-ago love, Daisy, now living just across Long Island Sound, will wander into the sprawl one day. Anything could happen, and no one would have to know.
For those of us ready to entertain again, and craving the intimacy of a large party, ripe with risk and opportunity, there is no better reading than “The Great Gatsby.” The summer may be long and lazy, but “Gatsby,” almost a century on, remains hard and glittery. It’s a tonic for listlessness, bracing and sharp, like a gin cocktail on a sweltering afternoon.
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