Author: Andrew Sullivan

Not very, argues Jonathan Povilovis. From his lengthy critique, which questions its status as “The Great American Novel”:

Jay Gatsby disowned his family and made millions illegally, which for many is just cause to hold up self-righteous noses and applaud the fact that his funeral was under-attended—the bastard deserved it. But even if you’re happy to think that the ‘20’s were corrupt no matter how you look at them, so who cares how Gatsby got rich; or even if you’re left-leaning enough to see that Tom Buchanan did even less to earn his fortune than Gatsby did his, tossing the legalities aside, there’s still something unsettling about this whole narrative. What scares the hell out of me is not that I still want to cheer for Jay Gatsby even though he’s done some bad things—I don’t care that I don’t care that he’s simply done bad things. I care that he did them all for a person. He wanted to be with Daisy, the woman he loved.

What this means is that Gatsby is a man with very serious desire. He not only broke laws but also went to (literally) absurd lengths to lie, to falsely present himself to Daisy (and everyone else) in order to gain her love. But unfortunate for him and critical for us is that the way that Gatsby went about trying to [get] Daisy’s love excludes the possibility that he could earn it, because earning love takes more than just serious desire: it also takes some serious integrity. In other words, real love requires that you submit to a pretty high standard set of ethical rules, including a level of honesty and vulnerability between you and your lover, often requiring you to relinquish some of those more selfish desires; but this is not the kind of love that appears center stage in Fitzgerald’s novel.

Update from a reader:

The faulty logic in Povilovis’ essay is quite stunning. Where would we be without the lessons of the flawed character?

Would that line of reasoning not discount the importance of virtually every 20th century protagonist worth a damn (along with Shakespeare’s and so on, back through the Greeks and Romans).  Aren’t the flaws the entire point?  Isn’t it the sad bittersweet irony what makes the novel achingly “great,” and elevates the tragic mythology to a deeper level of metaphor that can speak on many levels – as a sweeping symbol of our flawed “great” country to the day-to-day struggles we each face in that quest for our own version of greatest above our personal baggage and the weight of our choices.

While Jay Gatsby was not in fact “great” in the most meaningful sense, there is a deeper meaning in his aspirations and yearning for that illusive mantel, as there is for Nick Adams and Lady Brett and Don Corleone and Tony Soprano and Walter White and Macbeth. Povilovis’ complaint seems to miss the point of literature entirely.

Another adds, “I’d rather have Atticus Finch as a father, but when I read a book, maybe I want to peer into the heart of darkness.” Another reader:

I don’t think Povilovis is suggesting The Great Gatsby isn’t a great novel; I think he’s saying Gatsby is a disturbing hero because of the great effort he makes to reinvent himself for this woman he loves, which is all founded on a lie.

But that tale of reinvention is why Gatsby endures.  Here is a man who (spoiler alert) cuts most of his ties with home, assumes a new identity and breaks the law, all to grab the money and power to make himself acceptable to Daisy.   And all his success, which American Gospel says should bring him contentment, fails him.  It doesn’t win him Daisy (Fitzgerald doesn’t seem fully convinced Daisy is actually worth it) and it can’t get him respect or acceptance in the class he’s muscled his way into.  As H.L. Mencken wrote of Rudolph Valentino, a year after Gatsby was published, he had achieved “a colossal and preposterous nothing.”

In some ways, Fitzgerald wrote a shorter and more lyrical version of the novels Theodore Dreiser had been sledgehammering out for years, about the seduction of material wealth and how the burning American desire for more can masks a rootless and more troubling anomie. But Dreiser, great and brave as he was, didn’t have the sympathy for his characters that Fitzgerald did.  Dreiser could outline the facts of the tragedy; Fitzgerald could break your heart.

Gatsby, by all rights, shouldn’t be borne back to the past; he should have carved out a new life and new identity for himself, made a tidy living, and found respectability.  That’s an American ideal: You can move away from your roots and start anew.  But like so many of us, he can’t pull himself away from the dreams of his past, and in the end, his enviable wealth fails him.

Gatsby’s story is one of destructive desire.  That is the story of many American dreams, and that’s what makes Gatsby great.

Meanwhile, Colin Marshall relays Gertrude Stein’s letter to Fitzgerald about the novel, which includes these comments:

I like the melody of your dedication and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment. You make a modern world and a modern orgy strangely enough it was never done until you did it in This Side of Paradise. My belief in This Side of Paradise was alright. This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Recent Dish on Fitzgerald and his novel here, here, and here. And go here for the recent debate over The Godfather as a great American novel.

Alec MacGillis is unsure that Detroit has them:

We’ve heard so much about all the vacant buildings in Detroit and the budding return of deal-seeking hipsters that there’s an assumption that the city is just waiting to be discovered by a wave of new residents of the sort that are flooding into Brooklyn and Washington but also, in smaller numbers, parts of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. What this misses is one of Detroit’s cruel ironies: while it has many, many vacant buildings available for a song, it lacks the sort of housing stock on which urban renaissances are born.

The “urban renewal” wave of the 1950s and ’60s was more disastrous in Detroit than anywhere else—to make room for a web of new expressways (built partly to speed travel among the big auto plants on the periphery), the city knocked down not only a major African-American neighborhood (thus contributing to the racial tensions that spawned the 1967 riots) but also a swath of buildings on the southwest corner of downtown, exactly the sort of warehouses and small factories that have been reborn as loft apartments and condos in other cities. There are also precious few of the brownstones and other rowhouses that are so popular with gentrifiers in other cities. As Jane Jacobs explained years ago, cities thrive on density, but Detroit, for the reasons described above, was always more spread out than other big cities. What is mostly left for housing, with the exception of rejuvenating pockets like the Midtown area around Wayne State and the Detroit Institute of Art, are some breathtakingly handsome Art Deco towers downtown in various stages of vacancy, and a sea of single family homes scattered across the vast expanse, offering less than ideal raw material for the sort of bikes-and-coffee-shop comeback we’ve seen in other cities.

Yglesias notes another handicap Detroit suffers – a lack of major universities:

The overall higher education sector in the United States takes a lot of criticism these days, but in part precisely because of the things that make it seem kind of bloated and inefficient it’s a very valuable urban amenity. Universities both create little neighborhood-level retail clusters around them, and along with medical facilities become the twin pillars of a regional knowledge-based economy. Of course cities can thrive without necessarily playing host to a prestigious private university or a public university flagship campus (San Antonio, for example) but for lots of older cities hit hard by the macroeconomic trends of the 1970s and 1980s the existence of major universities has provided a foundation for rebuilding.

Robin James looks at two recent NYT stories on urban noise through the lens of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (pdf):

Russolo was worried that traditional musical sounds were too pure to have any affective punch:

In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion (Russolo, 5).

Russolo thought we needed industrial noise to reinvigorate art music. “We get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds,” he argues, “than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies” (6). Modernist aesthetics value transgression and difficulty. The ability to tolerate and appreciate noise was a sign of avant-garde taste; so, cultural elites stereotypically valued “noisy” works, while the unwashed masses preferred kitsch. In the Times article, this modernist association between noise tolerance and privilege is reversed: sensitivity is a privilege reserved for those with means to protect themselves from it and preserve their delicate aural/affective palate, and noise-tolerance is the effect of exposure. …

You can even see this reversal in contemporary pop music aesthetics: mainstream pop–from the Biebs to Skrillex–is really noisy, while hipsters and NPR listeners prefer traditionally pretty, harmonious, folk-y, “new sincerity”-style artists.

Update from a reader:

This is as lazy as Thomas Friedman basing a column on a chat with a cabbie and as wrong as Peggy Noonan’s take on the IRS.

First, the use of the useless word “hipster” alongside NPR listenership as flags of privilege is lazy and tautological. Even if one charitably (in this context) interprets “hipster” as “trust fund kid”, I dare James to come to a show at Brooklyn’s Death by Audio or one of promoter Todd P’s more extreme events and come away insisting that “hipsters” don’t like noise. Likewise, I’d argue that the majority of free jazz fans today are probably NPR listeners. And can we merely stipulate that not all NPR listeners share the musical tastes of the producers who select the acts on the network’s air, as well as that a lot of “hipsters” like Skrillex?

Second, I don’t think it’s folks from Washington Heights, East New York, or Newark who flock to Lincoln Center to see performances of works by Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, etc. Or at Poisson Rouge on nights when noisier acts are playing.

Second, WTF does James mean by “noise” here? Bieber’s music is profoundly simple and euphonious. Skrillex is more complex but not by much. So it’s noise because it includes the same high-in-the-mix samples as so much other music today? If so, where would James put the original recyclers of the title of Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noise? Because at least here in the U.S., that band’s popularity was confined to college kids and … hipsters.

This is where blogging fails: when it attempts to offer instant and contrarian responses to more reasoned writing. I suggest a new Dish award, or at least a flag alongside the Poseur and Hathos alerts, for cultural analysis this lazy and jejune.