Maureen Corrigan is a book
critic for Fresh Air and a critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown
University. Her new book So We Read On is a reference to one of the last lines
in The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on ... " Nina Subin/Courtesy of
Little, Brown and Co. hide caption
When book critic Maureen
Corrigan first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in high school, she
was unimpressed.
"Not a lot happens in
Gatsby," Corrigan tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It's not a
plot-driven novel and I also thought, 'Eh, it's another novel about rich
people.' And I grew up in a blue-collar community."
She also couldn't relate, she
says, because it doesn't feature any likeable female characters.
"In fact, that's one of
the reasons why Fitzgerald thought it didn't sell well in 1925," Corrigan
says, "because there are no likeable female characters and women drive the
fiction market."
How the Great Gatsby Came to Be
and Why It Endures
by Maureen Corrigan
But today Corrigan considers
The Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel — and it's the novel she
loves more than any other. She's written a new book about it called So We Read
On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
Corrigan says she loves The
Great Gatsby in part because of its message that it's admirable to try to beat
your own fate.
"You can't escape the
past, but isn't it noble to try?" she says. "That's the message here
... to be the boat against the current, even though failure and death
inevitably await you. The doomed beauty of trying — that's what this novel is
about."
While Corrigan is hardly alone
in her evaluation of The Great Gatsby, she's perhaps unique in her ability to
write in such a lively and engaging way about the book, Fitzgerald's life and
the era in which it's set — the 1920s.
Corrigan has read The Great
Gatsby more than 50 times and has taught it to generations of college students.
She grew up near an area where part of the book is set in Queens, N.Y., which
is described as The Valley of Ashes because it was a dump for coal-burning
ashes.
As a book critic, Corrigan gets
more than 200 books a week delivered to her house by publishers, and she likes
to think that if The Great Gatsby were one of those books today, she'd read it.
She says, "I would've
opened it and thought, 'Huh, The Great Gatsby.' ... The title wouldn't have
grabbed me. What I do think would've grabbed me is the book jacket design. ...
It's very striking, it's non-representational. It's odd. I think if I had
opened the book and began reading, that [narrator] Nick [Carraway's] voice
would've grabbed me. I want to think that I would've kept on reading."
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Interview Highlights
On The Great Gatsby's
similarities to film noir
Gatsby almost has the form of a
film noir, where you have this voiceover, with Nick Carraway remembering things
that have taken place in the past, things that can't be changed, events that
can't be changed.
It's a violent story. There are
three violent deaths in Gatsby. It's a story in which you get bootlegging,
crime, explicit sexuality — and remember this is 1925 when it was published, so
it's pretty racy for its time. ...
We don't explicitly read about
[sex], but in chapter two, Nick is taken along by Tom Buchanan ... on a joy
ride into Manhattan where Tom takes Nick to ... a drunken party in The Love
Nest. So we know that there's infidelity — a lot of innuendo about people
having sex outside of marriage and a lot of drinking.
And, most importantly, film
noir, hard-boiled detective fiction and The Great Gatsby — they're all stories
that are obsessed with the presence of fate. There's a very fated feel to
Gatsby. Events that occur in the novel, they're foretold many times. That car
crash in which Myrtle Wilson is killed, Tom's mistress, there are two other car
crashes that preceded that car crash. So a lot of events are predicted in this
novel.
On Fitzgerald's background
[Despite his success], he was
also that Midwestern boy from St. Paul, Minn., whose parents didn't quite
measure up to their neighbors. His parents never owned a home, for instance,
they always rented. Fitzgerald never owned a home — he always rented.
He was always kind of on the
outside looking in and hoping to be good enough for Princeton, to be good
enough for the crowd on the Riviera who he hung out with — [wealthy
expatriates] Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Hemingways, etc. I think you get that
sense in Fitzgerald of someone who remade himself but was also aware at times
in his life that he was pretending to be someone he was not.
Even when he died in 1940, Fitzgerald was
denied burial in his own family's plot in Rockville, Md., because the Catholic
Church [Fitzgerald grew up Catholic] decided that his novels were a little too
risque and ... didn't approve of them. So Fitzgerald had to be buried in a
Protestant cemetery. He's always being pushed out and told that he's not good
enough.
On Gatsby's reception in its
time
The literary readers — people
like Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, who was a critic and
reviewer of the time who really got Gatsby — they loved it. ...
The popular reviewers read it
as a crime novel and thought for the most part that it was maybe just OK.
There's a famous headline for a review of The Great Gatsby that came out in the
New York World, and the headline reads, "Fitzgerald's Latest A Dud."
On Gatsby's second life
When Fitzgerald died in 1940 in
Hollywood, his last royalty check was for $13.13. Remaindered copies of the
second printing of The Great Gatsby were moldering away in [publisher]
Scribner's warehouse.
World War II starts, and a
group of publishers, paper manufacturers, editors [and] librarians get together
in New York. And they decide that men serving in the Army and Navy need
something to read. ... They printed over 1,000 titles of different books, and
they sent over a million copies of these books to sailors and soldiers serving
overseas and also to [prisoners of war] in prison camps in Japan and Germany
through an arrangement with the Red Cross.