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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Personally, the book never did anything for me.
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I always like talking to someone who is civil about shredding the merits of a classic tome. Some tomes deserve it, perhaps.
When my first (and still unpublished because it's embarrassing!) novel was being considered by Fiction Collective, one of the judges told me he loved it until he got to the ending, which he said reminded him of
The Grating Gatsby. I don't mind telling you my first instinct was to grab a Ruger Speed-Six, climb to the rooftop of an Ortiz Funeral Home and deflate the tires of several fancy-schmantzy hearses tucked out back.
Gatsby, you say? In a word, r-r-r-r-wh-a-a-A-A-a-a-r-r-r-uh.
That yiped, I have to bleat that, beyond the pellucid jazz-age prose that I'd never have associated with Princeton, what I've always admired about 'Gerald's famous novel is the double emotional meaning of its protag. Celebs have often compared themselves to Gatsby (the lovely Peed Iddy being a current example) because he seems to embody style and share an affinity with the reader even though anyone who's watching will realize he's vicious -- not in a natty-proto-hiphop-Iceberg way, but in a this-murderous-Bruno-ain't-the-pining-climbing-fop-oi-expected sort of way.
I've always liked protags and narratives that can be construed alternately as romantic or vile. I love stories involving characters whom certain readers can moon over while others squint and fling mental spittle.
One of my favorite moments during my brief career as a hack was when a woman approached me and said me she had read one of my stories and wanted to meet the writer because the main character was "so gentle and loving."
"That's definitely how the character sees himself," I semi-agreed. "But did you notice that he nearly raped a woman who had passed out in his apartment and then buried her in a landfill after she went to the bathroom to self-medicate away the trauma and OD'd? He does sound caring in his own head while he's doing those things, though."
So to retoin to your political theory, my good Walker, I'd say that readers who like
Gatsby as a book but find nothing redeeming about the character are likely to at least appreciate the politics of the man who wrote
Vapes of Graft. Whereas people who like Grabsy might entertain notions of socio-economic autonomy that put them at odds with Mr. Johb Neinstreck's beliefs.
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I really liked the Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck though, so different strokes for different folks.
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I happened to like it, too.
But what I'm more excited about is
Mrs. Dalloway entering the public domain: the original psychological novel that was directly informed by Woolf's friend Lytton Strachey's translations of Freud's
Six Analytical Studies -- not because of
Dolorway's academic significance but because I could take a leisurely shower in Virginia Woolf's style. ("Style is rhythm," she once said).