This is quite the enjoyable piece of literature. It's short enough to enjoy over a weekend, or even a long evening if you read quickly enough. It's length is a benefit to it. It's paced so perfectly and every reveal is only hinted at a few pages prior at most. One of the most important things in books is for even the most mundane scenes to be written with such choice of words that it is still gripping or beautiful. All of my favorite authors are good at this type of writing and F. Scott Fitzgerald manages that same talent in this book.
This story holds my fascination throughout for different reasons at different stages in the book. Firstly it is a fun glimpse into the past, this quickly loses its appeal but shows itself in bursts throughout the book and keeps you planted in the setting. Obviously when this book was first published it didn't have the benefit of transporting you to a different time so it managed to succeed on other merits. Just as the setting began to lose it's weight the captivating part becomes the society in which the narrator lives. The drunkenness, the sexual immorality, the social drama. Just as his descriptions of the drunken train wrecks which are his associates' lives become stale they too fade into the background and just become part of the setting clearing the way for the real meat and potatoes of the story. The strange geometric shape of the characters' love and infatuation comes to a dramatic crescendo in the final chapters of the book. The story goes off the rails and plummets into the soapiest of drama as every character's tensions go off the charts and it's absolutely delightful to read. As the situation sorts itself out and things calm down we're given a perfect tragic ending to the story. The narrator is left as the haze clears trying to sort out Gatsby's affairs and coming to the realization that he is the only person left that really cares for the man. This society that revered him never really cared for him.
This book just does such a great job of keeping the story going in a fresh direction the entire time. Every scene is interesting and provides a unique purpose to the story. Every character needs to be there for a specific reason. The book has no fat and isn't missing a damn thing.
