"That Slender Riotous Island": The Great Gatsby Revisited

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recommended Reading: The Great Gatsby

There is nothing like picking a novel off my shelf, uncompelled by anything but my own desire that day. This is how I finally truly read The Great Gatsby, in a small apartment one lonely summer deep along the north shore of Long Island, in one of many small towns that exist between New York and the Hamptons, much deeper into the island than East or West Egg.

I had read Fitzgerald’s most well-known novel once before, in the scattered rush of my junior year, as I began frantically tying up the loose-ends of my undergraduate education. It was a secondary reading for the literary theory course I was taking that semester, where we read a textbook in which the author used The Great Gatsby in every chapter to illustrate the most common theoretical lenses. I’ve hated assigned readings more. My freshman year of high school turned Great Expectations from a thrilling page turner—dealt out to me chapter by chapter much as it must have been when it appeared serially, by my parents, who, without consistency or discipline sometimes plucked classics off their shelves and took them up as family reading. That year, however, the task was set by my terrorist of an English teacher, to reread the novel, a woman who abusively likened her students to monkeys and reassured us of the uselessness of trying to educate us. Some form of internalized sexism? Imagine being an older woman, looking out into a room full of impressionable fourteen-year-old girls and likening them to an animal you think is too stupid to learn just as they’re beginning high school. Only a carefully nurtured love of reading at home kept me convinced that literature was my calling. Under her tenure Great Expectations became just another blunt instrument used for berating and belittling, and I’ll admit I’ve never read it again because the memories of that year cut a little too deep.

But The Great Gatsby wasn’t an unpleasant read, a brief novel taught by an incredibly giving and thoughtful professor. Its only real failures were circumstantial: pressed for time under my four course load and having never travelled north of Virginia many of the details were indecipherable and those that weren’t became lost amidst the jumble of three literature courses and the demands of Spanish irregular verbs.

But alone on Long Island, my first summer there I had too much time, and I felt like Nick Carraway, though without the class, gender, or racial privilege of the narrator. Nevertheless, I too was a transplant caught up in the “overripe” heat. I too “went out to the country alone” (3) to take up residence in “a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at” (3) more than eighty a month “on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York” (4). Though, unless you count what Thomas Pynchon has characterized as the “homicidal” driving on Long Island (is Daisy Buchanon running Driver’s ed out there?) I found no riots that summer outside the pages I read on sweltering summer days, sprawled across my bed or sitting on my stoop glancing up at my landlord’s lush garden for inspiration. My world that summer was made less lonely by Fitzgerald’s glamorous cast of characters. I read with Nick, giggled with Jordan and Daisy, and dreamed with Gatsby until a friend flew in and briefly relieved my loneliness. I read a lot that summer, but only two books really reached me. The Great Gatsby was one.

If you ever have the chance to read it by the water, preferably on Long Island, it’s a slim book, great for travel. Slip it off your shelf and take it along. You won’t regret it. Alternatively, reading The Great Gatsby after a move is also an ideal time, because it captures so much of the loneliness and melancholy of that first year anywhere. Commune with Fitzgerald and let his prose sooth your frustrated, lonely soul as you wait for the second year, when it gets better.

Have you read The Great Gatsby? If so when, where, and under what circumstances? How did you like it? Do you own a copy or will you be adding it to your shelf? Let me know in the comments below, and remember, if you’re following along for the book recommendations, this is one I teach when I teach urban literary studies and a must read if you’re looking to acquaint yourself with New York City literature.

Since my own first experience with The Great Gatsby as someone unacquainted with the specificities of the North East, New York City, and Long Island, I’ll go over some of the details next week to give you a more situated experience of the novel.