Nothing great about Gatsby.

By the 20th century, America was a frivolous country. That’s what Fitzgerald saw, a party that never ends where people are never more lost than when in a crowd.

Just who is Jay Gatsby? What is more, do I really care to know?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of those classic novels that has passed me by. I can’t really say why I have not read it, likely it is because I have read it by osmosis; I have absorbed it. It is built into our culture. I know the book without ever having opened it.

I have never seen any of the film adaptations either.

So I have rectified that. This past week I sat down with it and it only confirmed my suspicions. The characters are loathsome, they inhabit a vacuous world, it stinks of the new.

Hell is indeed other people.

This is America: a soulless, sham of a nation. Violence is its trade. Loneliness is its relief.

How fitting I read this awful story as Donald Trump celebrated his nation’s 250^th birthday with a punch up on the White House lawn.

I am still asking: who is Jay Gatsby?