It is almost too symmetrical. On the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, it is Elon Musk, titanic car manufacturer and destroyer of worlds, who defines the spirit of a new America. The American car, emblem of power, speed and social mobility, happens to be the dominant symbol in F Scott Fitzgerald’s tour de force. “Car” is mentioned 87 times in the 180-page book. A car conveys the characters towards their reckonings. A car delivers the novel’s bloody denouement.
Gatsby unfolds the story of the enigmatic, self-made millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and his romantic obsession with Daisy Buchanan, the wife of a rich, brutish layabout, Tom. The tale is told by Nick Carraway – he bears in name the national aspiration to be carried away by a car to gratifying success – Daisy’s “second cousin once removed”. Nick, hailing from the Midwest, graduated from Yale into the Great War, after which he came east for a summer to “learn the bond business”. He has rented a carriage house on Gatsby’s property, a stone’s throw from the magnificent mansion where Gatsby presides over antic, empty parties, as he broods upstairs, gazing longingly at the Buchanans’ house directly across the bay.
Nick is indeed learning the “bond business”: he has found himself in a situation where fundamental human bonds are trampled upon. Tom openly betrays Daisy with other women, and is currently carrying on an affair with Myrtle, the wife of George Wilson, a despondent owner of a gas station. After discovering that Gatsby has moved close by, Daisy openly conducts an affair with him. Nick lies about his intentions in order to seduce Daisy’s tough yet vulnerable friend, Jordan. Gatsby’s closest business associate is Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler and “the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919”, as Gatsby explains to Nick. Astounded, Nick marvels how “one man could play with the faith of 50 million people”.
Gatsby is one long de-idealisation, though curiously it never loses its own stubborn romanticism. In that, the book has the alcoholic character of its author. “I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage,” the polo-playing Tom boasts to Gatsby, and you think of Gatsby’s literary forebear, Flaubert’s doomed romantic Emma Bovary, who is seduced with high sentiments amid the odours of an agricultural fair. The promise of American capitalism, once embodied by Henry Ford’s affordable automobiles, has been reduced to the “dust-covered wreck of a Ford” in Wilson’s garage. The wraithlike Wilson is all that is left of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive ideals.
The novel moves from white to yellow, from the white dresses of high-society matrons to the yellow car, driven by Daisy, which accidentally cuts down Myrtle. Illusions and delusions are burned away. Daisy, Gatsby’s ideal, rejected him for the wealthy Buchanan and only takes up with him again to punish Tom for his entanglement with Myrtle. Gatsby himself is actually James Gatz, the son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” in North Dakota. He is the American self-made man par excellence – Gatz, be! – a testament to capitalism’s moral indifference.
But even capitalism’s victor falls foul of the novel’s castration machine. As Tom and Gatsby brag to each other about possessing Daisy one sweltering afternoon in a rented room at the Plaza, they are actually unmanning each other. Daisy is the novel’s masculine force: “I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes,” she jokes in a savage cut to both men, as she arranges to meet Tom later. Earlier, she tells Gatsby, a genuine war hero, “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around,” reducing him to both a baby and an invalid. War, pandemic (the 1918 flu pandemic), wives newly emboldened by the suffrage movement, and perhaps most of all, a rising income tax, legislated just a few years earlier, are chainsaws hanging over the American male in Gatsby. The emasculated Wilson kills the emasculated Gatsby, mistakenly believing that he, not Daisy, ran down his wife.
For all its de-idealisations, Gatsby remains as fluid in its ultimate impressions as its narrator, Nick, who describes himself with adolescent American verve as “one of the few honest people that I have ever known”. You never know whether he means it. Gatsby sometimes seems as much a puzzle to Fitzgerald: he observes to Nick, with worldly mordancy, that Daisy’s voice is “full of money” before falling back into his childish fantasy of her. Like its author, wounded by drink, the novel is liquescent, alternating between gorgeous prose and embarrassing purple passages: “his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears”.
Liquescence has its grace. “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope,” Nick tells us at the book’s beginning, and the novel’s final lines settle into such a clement simultaneity of meaning. “Gatsby believed in the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock,” Nick writes elegiacally. The green is money, and freshness and youth; it is also a traffic light, eternally green for heedless Americans – like the reckless driver, Daisy – who tolerate no limits on their desires. “So we beat on, boats against the current” is how Fitzgerald formulates Americans’ destiny, through Nick. “Beat on” as in persist; “beat” as in a restless romantic heart; “beat” as in strike, pound, injure. Gatsby’s America – which is also our own – is driven, tense, lustrous, precarious. It is a mixed stream of new and sudden experiences. It is also a golden excretion full of money, brutality and harm.
[See also: A Northumbrian pilgrimage]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025