I hate, hate, hate to admit it… but I’m very easily swayed by popular opinion. I spent most of high school reading both the “classics” and other popular books (mostly ones written by white men) because I thought I should. Since then, I’ve gone through phases where I either liked books because everyone else did… or refused to. The point being that what others thought of them always had importance, for me.
I only recently reread The Great Gatsby after having first been introduced to it in high school. My memories of the book were hazy: I remembered the plot and characters far less than I did the ambiance, that glitz and glamor of the 1920s that so many evoke when referencing Gatsby. It wasn’t until I reread it that I remembered the unreliable, second-hand narrator; the characters that barely seem to know who they are. It is deft and beautiful, but it is not the book I remember it being.
Is it because I had no memories to compare it to, no recommendations for or against it, that I enjoyed Tender is the Night so much more, when I finally read it this summer while on the Riviera Fitzgerald so lovingly evokes? I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that I was intrigued by his characters’ exploration of sanity and responsibility, an obvious echo of Fitzgerald’s own marriage to his wife Zelda. I was captivated by the mutability of the narrative voice, jumping from head to head, from character to character. I allowed myself to be swept as in a gentle tide from the first point of view to the second and onwards, from a voice that establishes us in the story only to seem to become inconsequential and then rise in importance once more chapters later.
This book has several obvious flaws, especially when read from a 21st-century perspective. But it is, for me, an even more masterful examination of the ways in which people can affect and touch one another than Gatsby, and for that, I love it.