This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is classic required reading for high school students across the country. However, I somehow managed to avoid reading this book until a time of my own choosing. (Though I was required to read Like Water for Chocolate which no one outside of my high school seems to have read.) The Great Gatsby is also considered universally to be a masterpiece of American literature. It was chosen by editors from Random House as the second best novel published in the English language since 1900. Radcliffe Publishing chose it as the best novel in their rival list. It is consistently mentioned as a Great American Novel, and it is only about 180 pages long, so it’s a perfect way to start investigating all those things that you should have read when they were assigned.

I have to confess that this was one of the books that led me to create the Great American Novel Challenge. I chose to spend part of my summer improving my writing, and in this effort, I found Susan Bell’s analysis of how editing improved The Great Gatsby. I felt convicted for not having read the book. Now that I have read it, I feel like I need to read it again. Almost as soon as I finished I knew that Susan was right: this book was meticulously crafted. The book has not become outdated; it has become more elegant with age. This is where all that careful editing pays off. There are several sentences, particularly later in the novel, that are packed with meaning.

One could say that The Great Gatsby is another book about materialism or debauchery, but that sells it short. One could also say that it is about one man’s attempt to recapture the past, but that too sells the novel short. It is about the nature of authentic love, but again, labeling it as such sells it short. It is about the culture war between the midwest and the east coast, but in some ways it is about every culture war. It is about achieving the American Dream, or maybe defining your own American Dream, but this too seems to be incomplete.

Perhaps it is best to label The Great Gatsby as the first book to explore the quarter-life crisis. Although the term itself is relatively new, Fitzgerald shows that the concept is not. Virtually all the characters are in their late twenties and early thirties. They are all frustrated with their relationships, struggling to form meaningful long-term plans, and most of them are nostalgic for some earlier time in their lives when things seemed to make sense. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in his late 20’s himself when the book was published. It seems that Generation X and Generation Y are not the first to wonder about their place in the world. Even before America was a world superpower, Americans have struggled with trying to find a way to live meaningfully, contribute to the world, and in so doing become the “greatest” images of ourselves. In many ways, we are still living in the Jazz Age.

I promised myself that regardless of the books I chose to read as a part of the Great American Novel Challenge, I would offer some critique rather than simple-minded, endless affection. It’s easy to praise the things that worked because everyone likes to hear about what works. In addition, most reviewers don’t want to believe that they read something generally not worth reading. However, no book is perfect, and for me the part of the book that was least effective was the role of Nick Carraway as both participant in the novel and narrator of the novel. Weaving between these two literary roles would be challenging for any author, but Fitzgerald doesn’t do it well enough to avoid all confusion about whether Nick was a ‘real’ character. Nick’s character development seems stunted, particularly in the early parts of the book. I suppose this bothered me less by the end either because Nick was more of a participant or because I had grown accustomed to it.

Nick’s character development aside, The Great Gatsby is a fantastic book. It’s a short read, and if you haven’t read it you can easily finish it in an afternoon. Since much of the book actually takes place around the fourth of July and throughout the summer, I would urge you to consider reading it on a lazy summer Saturday afternoon. It’s not as stuffy or “intellectual” as you might think. There’s drugs, sex, controversy, murder, and all the things that would get it an R rating if Michael Bay turned it into a movie.

Now that I’ve posted this review, I have officially accepted the Great American Novel Challenge. One book down, twelve to go. I will update this post on Monday with a list of the links to other participating blogs. If you are interested in participating, feel free to start at any time.

[Update: At this point in the challenge, there are two other participating bloggers. Allison posted her review of Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner, 1936) on the morning of the 4th, and Carl posted his review of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper, 1826) just under the wire on the evening of the 4th. I'd encourage you to take a look at their thoughts on these books. If you're interested in participating, grab a book and post a review on August 4th.]