The Not So Great Gatsby

Okay, I'll admit that I haven't read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and have only seen the two movie variants of it, but having seen them both more than once, I don't get it.

This story is lame in the extreme.

Why do people like it.

It may be just me, but I strongly suspect that there's a class of literature that is preserved mostly because it was regarded as super interesting, or super avant garde, or something, at the time it was written, and otherwise has very little merit.  I'd put James Joyce in that category, frankly.  His work is still read as somebody way back in blushed when they read it, and that made his reputation.  Now he's foisted off on university students and the volumes keep selling for that reason.

Same thing with most Hemingway.  Oh, some of his works are good, but are badly written and boring.  Yes, I said that. Badly written and boring.  Using a complete economy of words is a writing attribute a lot of children have and doesn't make you a great writer.

J. D. Salinger is not that great either.  I'm pretty convinced his works live on simply because university literature professors convince thier charges that the work is good, because somebody told them that, so in turn those graduates enter high school English departments and foist Salinger off on young minds, who know better.

And so it is with The Great Gatsby.

This story is just stupid.  Suspension of reality aside, are we really to believe that Gatsby rises from a poor discharged officer to a super fantastically uber super duper humongously fantastically wealthy person in a few years simply through his own titanic (and illegal) activities just to impress Daisy Buchanan.  Oh come on.

And why would anyone with a brain be interested in Daisy Buchanan, at least as she's portrayed on film.  She's boring beyond belief. She's as dull as a toast sandwich made up of two slices of toast, with a piece of toast in between. Dull.

Perhaps, of course, she's not quite such a paler shade of dull in print.

The golfing lady is more interesting however.

And is a person whose grasp on morality is so poor that he helps set up his married cousin in a tryst with a man involved in criminal activity really that interesting as a protagonist?

I don't care what literature profs say about this one, this story is lame.