![]() When, in the novel’s last chapters, Nick moves into the West Egg cottage next door to the mansion owned by his soon-to-be friend, it feels like a deus ex machina, the author trying in vain to synchronize the two independent plots before his story ends.ĭespite this, Nick breathes new life into Gatsby’s “Catholic element” in its own way. As Judah moves in and out of opium-induced hazes, Nick nurses him and listens to his story.Īpart from a few scattered echoes, there is very little in the plot of Nick that links it with Gatsby. One bar owner named Judah is a war survivor like Nick and is dying from the effects of gas poisoning. Unlike others, Nick is not drawn to the fleshly pleasures of the city instead he finds kinship with those who find those pleasures to be an outlet for their grief. Haunted by demons, Nick travels to New Orleans and grows enmeshed in the lives of those who run the brothels and bars of the French Quarter. Nick emerges from the tunnels and returns to America with hopes of leaving every part of the war behind him. ![]() Nearly catatonic, he volunteers to fight in the tunnels under the trenches at the front, a veritable death sentence. The loss of that love-and more-sends Nick into a spiral. Smith effectively juxtaposes the horrors of war with the human warmth of the city, where Nick pursues and finds love. The first section of the novel takes place in France, alternating between scenes on the battlefront of the First World War and in Paris. On the contrary, Smith’s novel is transcendent, a chilling portrayal of a man and world broken by unspeakable suffering but sustained, however feebly, by a spark of hope. Smith’s story is told in terse, strong prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Gone is the innocent, lyrical first-person narrator of Gatsby. The gaudy opulence of West Egg gives way to blood and mud and fire, and the stench of death hangs over Smith’s novel just as the green light does Fitzgerald’s. Smith’s story is told in the third person, in terse, strong prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Readers looking for a prequel written in the same vein as Fitzgerald’s classic will be disappointed, however. 1 of this year, The Great Gatsby entered the public domain, just in time for Michael Farris Smith’s new novel Nick, which attempts to tell the backstory of Gatsby’s narrator. His refusal to judge makes him “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men” and leads him to love and admire Jay Gatsby for his “extraordinary gift of hope,” even though he also represents everything for which Nick has “unaffected scorn.” ![]() Nick Carraway, the narrator, embodies this double vision. Though Fitzgerald changed his mind, Gatsby remains rooted in a Catholic sensibility, largely evident in its straddling of spirit and flesh, redemption and sin. ![]()
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