Gatsby and beyond

 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Who has not laboured in undergraduate school pondering what makes Gatsby great? Jay Gatsby, owner of a splendid mansion in West Egg, host to ostentatious parties, and who carries his expensive suits with aplomb. Everyone speculates that a dark shadow lurks in his past and Mr Gatsby is not who he says he is. Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbour, slowly develops a sympathy for Gatsby. He finds out that his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, is the key to unlocking the enigma. In a previous lifetime, before Daisy became Mrs. Buchanan, there was Daisy, Jay, and a future full of possibilities.

I first read this book more than twenty years ago and it continues to be a favourite. Perhaps it’s because of Gatsby’s tunnel vision to improve himself and attain his dream. Maybe it’s because of the freedom, sultriness, and sophistication that envelope this book.  It could be the realisation that notwithstanding the disparateness in class and wealth, people can be happy and unhappy in almost equal measures. Or it may be the beautiful conversations: sonorous, elegant, and saturated with unarticulated meanings and desires. There’s also that enunciated contempt and cynicism, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” And of course, there is the hot reverberating anger of Nick shouting across the lawn, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together!” It may also be how the whole story ended – with a bang, literally. 

 

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor (2022)

Jillian Cantor is not letting things be. Fitzgerald ended “The Great Gatsby” as an open-and-shut murder and suicide case. It also left in its wake, a general impression of vapid, selfish women. Cantor gives these women the time of day in her new book.

There’s Daisy Buchanan who has a back story to why she went off and married Tom and his wealth. Jordan Baker and her grit to succeed a male-dominated sport and headlong tackle prejudices. Catherine McCoy who refuses to accept that men are the answer to women’s aspirations and who believes that women should be given the opportunities to run their lives on their own terms. There is an outcry running in this book that women have had enough of the patriarchy and that henceforth, they will take matters into their own hands.

Cantor is so deft in her storytelling that at the end of the book, we walk away cheering Daisy, Jordan, and Catherine with the thought crossing our minds that, “Hey, Mr Gatsby wasn’t that great after all” and that these beautiful women were most definitely not little fools.

 Postscript:

The characters in Cantor’s book seemed to have imbibed a prodigious amount of mint julep and gin rickey that I thought of making these:

 

Mint Julep

Ingredients:

2 ounces bourbon

¼ ounce simple syrup

8 mint leaves

Garnish: mint sprig

Garnish Angostura bitters (optional)

 

Directions:

Place the mint leaves in the bottom of an old-fashioned glass and top with the sugar.

Muddle these together until the leaves begin to break down.

Add a splash of seltzer water, fill the glass ¾ with crushed ice.

Add the bourbon.

Top with another splash of seltzer, stir, and garnish with a sprig of mint.

Serve immediately

  

Simple Syrup

Ingredients:

½ cup granulated sugar

½ cup water

Directions:

Add the sugar and water to a small saucepan over medium heat

Stir until sugar is dissolved

Let cool, then pour into a glass jar and seal tightly with a lid.

(will keep for about a month, refrigerated)

  

Gin Rickey

Ingredients:

2 ounces gin

½ ounce lime juice, freshly squeezed

Club soda, to top

Garnish: lime wheels

Directions:

Fill a highball glass with ice.

Add the gin and lime juice.

Top with club soda.

Garnish with 2 lime wheels. 

How to do an ending

 

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene

It is said that “there is more than one way to skin a cat”. There is also a song that laments, “breaking up is hard to do”.  Saying goodbye can be abrupt, decisive, and final. It can be cruel and malevolent. Or it can be a drawn-out experience: excruciating, philosophical, and cathartic at the end.

 This Is Not How It Ends by Rochelle Weinstein (2020)

Charlotte and Philip’s story is a cosmopolitan fairy tale: wealthy, dashing man meets pretty, young bookworm and they live happily ever after in Islamorada. Well, not quite. Philip is one busy man but after he got engaged to Charlotte, his business trips became inexplicably prolonged. Charlotte, after weighing things, decided on a painful course of action only to backpedal after a shattering experience. Running into an upscale New York restaurant called TINHIE, however, changed everything.

 

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)

Tony Webster’s story unfolds slowly, gently, and then jarringly. At his age, he thinks life has become peaceable and should not hold any more surprises. After all, hasn’t he managed to stay friends with his ex-wife and maintain a good relationship with his daughter even after his divorce? Then out of the blue, he received a letter informing him that the mother of Veronica, girlfriend from a previous lifetime, has bequeathed to him some money and two documents. He is forced to confront a past that he had perfunctorily whitewashed. And here lies the heart of the matter as Veronica has jarringly put across Tony: “You don’t get it, but then you never did.”

 

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)

Maurice Bendrix, a writer of some fame in the 1940s, sought out Henry and Sarah Miles, with the intention of surreptitiously gathering material and inspiration for his next book. Little did Maurice know that he will be catapulted into a relationship of unimaginable jealousy, suffering, and rage at how the universe has decided to arrange itself. This is a book that exhaustively takes on the moral aspects of a complicated relationship and its theological and mystical ramifications.

 

How does one know that it is the end? Graham Greene’s Bendrix rationalised: “Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you, matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”

 

Hello, Summer!

 

The perplexing 11-day disappearance of Agatha Christie

In her mid-thirties, crime novelist Agatha Christie disappeared without explanation. Her beloved mother had recently passed away and there was growing discord and acrimony in the Christie household. A massive manhunt ensued which bizarrely involved two other authors, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers. Agatha was found 11 days after at the Swan Hydro, a luxurious hotel in the spa town of Harrogate. It appeared that she had earlier checked in under the assumed name of the rumoured mistress of her husband, Archibald.  Agatha’s husband would later ascribe the author’s disappearance  to “memory loss”. 

The mystery has persisted even almost a century after Agatha Christie’s disappearance. The “memory loss” explanation strikes one as unimaginative considering that it is the enigmatic Agatha who is involved here. Did the author really enter a psychogenic trance, a condition brought on by trauma or depression? Did she stage her disappearance as a publicity stunt to promote her books? Or did she do it as a comeuppance to her philandering husband?

Kristel Thornell attempts to fill the gaps in her “On the Blue Train” (2016).  We see Agatha’s escape to freedom and carefree days at Harrogate shopping, relaxing, dining, and dancing.  Fans of the author may find it hard to believe, however, that this is all to Agatha’s story. It is diaphanous, and the introduction of the lightweight widower Harry McKenna creates a weakness in Thornell’s narrative. 

Marie Benedict similarly tries her hand in “The Mystery of Mrs. Christie” (2020).  Instead of linearly explaining the disappearance, Benedict constructs her novel like a crime story.  She provides the context of the courtship and heady early days of the Christies couple, the unravelling of the marriage, the recriminations, and the attempt to salvage the family from Agatha’s point of view.  Benedict then cleverly embeds these against the nerve-wracking 11-day search for the missing author from Archibald’s perspective. The ending is so astute and cunning that it is something that the author would likely applaud, even if such had been only tangentially true. 

Nina De Gramont is even more audacious in her “The Christie Affair” (2022). The author creates a story within a story. She takes her readers on a long journey to Ireland in the 1900s with its appalling poverty and shocking orphanages and institutions for unwed mothers. One starts to wonder where Agatha and her privileged life fits in this tale of young love, abandonment, and disgrace. Then De Gramont marvellously ties all these seemingly loose threads in an explosive ending of vengeance, murder, redress, and possibilities.

If you want to do your own sleuthing, the Swan Hotel still exists. My takeaway, whatever the explanation is for Agatha Christie’s disappearance: do not mess with a writer.