Gatsby

As tepid reviews of the new film come crawling in, Andrew Sullivan rounds up some critics of the novel.

I’m the camp of people who think Gatsby (the novel) is brilliant.  Am I an unwitting misogynist?  I will say that Fitzgerald’s admission “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy” makes sense to me as a writer.  As readers, we all have feelings about those emotional relations, but I do believe it’s very possible to view such integral characters through a glass, darkly.  For them to be fully realized, and not ever-receding expressions of one’s self, they almost have to be shrouded and respected as hard-to-know people.  These two people are perhaps uncommonly unknowable, even to their maker.  And that, of course, is the point.