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Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.13.1.0278

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

American Literature and Culture

An introduction—by which I mean neither a preface nor an opening chapter to a monograph but a full-length study offering an overview of a writer, major work, or literary era—is an art form unto itself. Usually more of a synthesis than a groundbreaker, this type of work can frustrate a writer by reining in the impulse to originality and obligating him or her to what can feel like an ungodly amount of summarizing. For scholars and critics eager to experiment with innovative organization and individuality of expression, the requisites of series formats, house styles, and even non-negotiable word lengths can also seem limiting if not absolute personality killers. And while one might assume that the market for critical guides to F. Scott Fitzgerald or The Great Gatsby hit saturation levels long before independent academic publishers such as G. K. Hall became shadowy imprints of their former selves as international corporations and private equity consortiums gobbled them up, the reality is that these types of reference works are the lifeblood of the academic book market. Long-running series such as The Cambridge Companion to …, The Cambridge Introduction to …, Reaktion Books' Critical Lives, the University of South Carolina's Understanding …, Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective, to name just a few, offer libraries consistency and continuity as they cater to the only audience broad enough to come close to earning a profit: undergraduates. The downside is that while each of these publishers is eager for a Fitzgerald entry, the likelihood of Facts on File commissioning Gertrude Stein A to Z, Oxford University Press approving a prospectus for A Historical Guide to Nella Larsen, or Chelsea House cranking out a How to Write About Anita Loos is next to nil. Such books would not sell enough for a simple reason: these writers are not taught as extensively as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Poe, Hemingway, Twain, Emily Dickinson, or Tennessee Williams. In this way, series devoted to introducing writers or literary eras to students can seem to enforce the canon instead of opening it up to neglected authors and periods.Rowman and Littlefield's entry into the crowded market for introductions is its relatively new Contemporary American Literature series. Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel is the kickoff volume, published first in hardback in 2013 and in paperback in 2015; Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture is the fifth addition to the lineup, following a curiously eclectic sequence of intervening volumes—on Michael Chabon; on the representation of masculinity in Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin; and on Stephen King. If it seems too soon for the series to return to Gatsby, it should be noted that the initial book focuses exclusively on Fitzgerald's 1925 classic, while this latest one is more of an introduction to modernism and the 1920s in general.Bob Batchelor, the series editor and author of The Cultural History, is prolific enough to remind one of the late Matthew J. Bruccoli: since 2002, his name has appeared on the covers of more than twenty-seven books, most of those since 2008. Even more impressive is his range. Among his authored works are titles on Bob Dylan and John Updike, not to mention the popular culture of various twentieth-century decades. Like Bruccoli, Batchelor is also a tireless editor, commissioning volumes not only for this series but Rowman and Littlefield's Great Books/Great Writers and Sports Icons and Issues in Popular Culture ones. Robert McParland, the author of Beyond Gatsby, may not be a one-man industry as Batchelor is, but he, too, is a seasoned writer and editor. In just the past five years he has compiled Bloom's How to Write about Joseph Conrad (2010) for Harold Bloom's latest student-guide series while also authoring full-length studies on Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and their relationships with their audiences. All of this is to say that both scholars are quite familiar with the peculiar challenges of writing for beginning literature students.At first glance, a teacher who relies upon these types of introductions for class preparation may wonder whether Batchelor's book is redundant given how many studies of the critical history of Gatsby are available. Robert Beuka's American Icon: The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context (2011) is barely four years old, after all, and it does such an enviable job of summarizing the main currents of Gatsby criticism over the decades that one initially wonders what Batchelor might add to the conversation. In actuality, though, there is little overlap between the books. A reader expecting a lengthy analysis of Marius Bewley's "Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America" (1954) may be surprised to find that this old warhorse appears only in passing in the section titled "The American Dream" (141)—curious, to be sure, given that no single essay helped establish that subject as the main theme of Gatsby as much as Bewley's. Although there is brief mention of the 1941 New Republic memorials that helped spark the posthumous Fitzgerald revival (57), Batchelor's study contains as many mentions of Donald Trump and Hank Moody (the fictional hero of Showtime TV's novelist-abused-by-Hollywood series Californication [2007–14], portrayed by David Duchovny) as of John Dos Passos or Edmund Wilson. The cultural impact Batchelor gauges, in other words, lies outside of high culture or even academia and more in the popular arena. In many ways then, this book can be thought of as a companion to its author's entries in his American Popular Culture Through History series (The 1900s, The 1980s, etc); history here just happens to refer to the history of how each decade has re-contextualized Fitzgerald's novel to suit its own needs.The idea of reading about the impact of novels and/or novelists on popular culture decades after their original era holds a great deal of promise. Fitzgerald studies could benefit from a book like Ron McFarland's recent Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character (2014), which examines fictional representations of its subject in novels, drama, and poetry, from the famous to the obscure, in their historical context. Given how often F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald pop up in both historical fiction and in romans à clef, including the recent spate that appears to be climaxing with the recent Amazon TV adaptation of Therese Anne Fowler's bestselling Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013), such a book would almost seem obligatory. Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel is a first step, but definitely a preliminary one, its reach circumscribed by its need to introduce students to the time periods from within which it analyzes Fitzgerald.To offer an example of this need: Batchelor looks at Paramount Pictures's slow-as-molasses 1974 film of the novel starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow against the backdrop of 1970s nostalgia, quoting the studio's then president, Frank Yablans, on why a novel then nearly fifty years old needed a third cinematic incarnation: "We thought people were quite fatigued with the pressures of contemporary living … and that nostalgia was a safety valve … the only way of getting perspective" (73). While Batchelor notes that both "the horrors of Vietnam" and "national morale-destroying tales of Watergate" explain why "people needed to break from the stress and strain of everyday life" (73), he never really explains how the movie attempted to service that need; while noting the marketing fads the movie inspired in fashion and beauty products, he does not depict the glamour these products connoted as a response to the economic stagflation and plummeting consumer confidence that marked the Nixon/Ford era. And while he digs up some interesting ephemera (Bruce Bahrenburg's Filming The Great Gatsby, a 1974 disposable making-of-the-movie paperback1), he never acknowledges the behind-the-scenes chaos that even in its day rendered the film one of the more notorious examples of Hollywood profligacy, with more resources squandered on stroking creative egos than on filmmaking.Instead, we are treated to factoids: Robert Redford had recently starred in The Sting, extras on the set were paid "the whopping sum of $1.65 an hour for a guaranteed twelve hours minimum daily" (81), and that the movie was filmed not on Long Island's Gold Coast but in Newport, Rhode Island. To be fair, Batchelor does go on to analyze a contemporaneous Saturday Evening Post essay on Fitzgerald's significance (81–83; see also Frazier 60–63, 141), but how exactly any of its points ties into the 1970s specifically is not addressed. Instead, throughout his discussions of Gatsby's historicity we are given what amount to historical semaphores: a section entitled "Fitzgerald and the Hippies" for the 1960s (75–80), a quick discussion of 1980s icons of affluence and greed—Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko (Michael Douglas) from the movie Wall Street (1988), the television shows Dallas and Dynasty (87), and an overview of why Bill Clinton was known as "Slick Willie" for the 1990s (103–5). Too bad there is no flannel in Gatsby to justify mention of Kurt Cobain and grunge rock.If this sounds harsh, it is more an indictment of the audience than the book. It is a cliché that most students today possess little historical memory; in fact, it was a cliché way back when I was an undergraduate. Nevertheless, most teachers probably know the feeling of dropping a reference to the Cold War or to the Iran hostage crisis and hearing crickets in return. If Batchelor's discussion of decades sometimes feels reductively basic, it is no doubt because we can no longer presume undergraduate readers know those basics. And yet even when he does contextualize Gatsby within references most twenty- and thirty-year-olds likely recognize (comparing Fitzgerald to the aforementioned Hank Moody of Californication, or Jay Gatsby to Mad Men's Don Draper, who also springs from his Platonic conception of himself), he misses some pretty spectacular trees for the whole forest.Where, for example, is a discussion of the brilliant episode "All Prologue" from the second season of David Simon's The Wire (2002–6), in which a prison English teacher played by novelist Richard Price prods a classroom of inmates to discuss Gatsby, leading to a moving exposition on the inescapability of the past by the doomed, reluctant drug dealer D'Angelo Barksdale (played by Larry Gilliard Jr.)? The scene is by far one of the most discussed not only in the history of the show (in part because D'Angelo soon meets his own Gatsby-like demise in the prison library) but in the history of the prestige-TV boom that began in 1999 with The Sopranos. Similarly missing is a discussion of the underappreciated 2002 hip-hop adaptation of the novel, G, which persuasively demonstrates how integral the Gatsbyesque desire to flaunt wealth is to African-American youth culture. These are worthy subjects for a study like this, but too often the book's discussion of decades feels obligated to explicate each era's iconography rather than dig into the nitty gritty and pose deeper, challenging questions.Only half of the book concerns decades; the second half focuses on relevant themes (Wealth and Power, Celebrity), and the freedom from having to define time periods helps the focus stay on comparisons between the text and specific historical incidents that demonstrate the inexhaustible relevance of Gatsby. Thus, Bernie Madoff, the most notorious convicted Ponzi-scheme perpetrator of the 2008 economic collapse, appears in a discussion of the novel's hints of bond manipulation and other financial chicanery (163), and David Lynch's 1990 ad for Calvin Klein Obsession perfume featuring a lithesome, pre-fame Benicio del Toro and Heather Graham pining for each other as passages of Gatsby are read aloud in silken tones is described in reference to treatments of romantic love (190–91).Along the way Batchelor impresses with detail: like Bruccoli, he enjoys citing the novel's sales figures in different periods, and a brief section on the career of Alabama congressman Frank W. Boykin (1885–1969), also known as the "Dixie Gatsby," is an intriguing sidebar illustrating how many colorful characters are equated with Fitzgerald's most famous creation, even when the similarities seem a mighty stretch (129–32). Batchelor also encourages his readers to compare the opulence of Gatsby's mansions to the "house porn" phenomenon of reality television (139), and to draw parallels between the euphoria of the Jazz Age and the "irrational exuberance" of the late 1990s dot.com boom, when fortunes were easily minted through ephemeral tech companies such as Pets.com that in retrospect seem like grandiose boondoggles (169–73). The book also includes a chapter-long assessment of Baz Luhrmann's controversial 2013 film version of Gatsby that offers students a variety of perspectives from which to analyze the challenges of making an adaptation to which younger audiences can relate (233–46).The best chapter, to my thinking, concerns reading and whether Gatsby deserves the ubiquity it has enjoyed on high school and college syllabi for almost fifty years now. Here Batchelor takes a decided stance against what he calls "the victory of standardized management" in secondary education (207), where the emphasis on quantifiable scores abets a broader wave of anti-intellectualism that devalues what we would likely call critical thinking, or students' ability to articulate their own interpretations of art by employing some calculated degree of argumentative engagement with the world of ideas. Batchelor makes a great case for Gatsby challenging younger readers to sift through its moral and aesthetic ambiguities to come to some nuanced appreciation of what the novel says about consumerism, values, and yes, even the American Dream. Whether that value has a place in an educational environment still reeling from No Child Left Behind mandates and unenlightened objections to Common Core Standards looms as the future's Great Unknown (215–17). Such questions are worth posing not just about the classroom but in it, too, with educators encouraging students to reflect meta-critically on debates about what and how they are taught. In this regard, it might have been interesting for Batchelor to engage arguments against the canonization of Gatsby, such as Kathryn Schulz's much-debated article "Why I Despise The Great Gatsby" (2013), which appeared amid the hullaballoo over the Luhrmann film and became something of a cause célèbre. Nevertheless, the chapter allows Batchelor to make a spirited case for why Gatsby is and will remain an important work of art.Compared to Batchelor, McParland has a somewhat larger challenge: instead of arguing for the relevance of a single text, he makes a case for the importance of a whole decade, insisting that the 1920s can serve as an "historical mirror" by which we can assess the "human condition" of our own time (xi). Considering that no American decade with the exception of the 1960s is romanticized as much as the Roaring Twenties, the need to advocate for it seems a little like preaching to the choir. Try getting a class of high schoolers excited about the 1910s if you want a real challenge. Nevertheless, McParland goes to great lengths to insist that issues ninety years ago should resonate today, arguing that the media may have changed, but the essential American personality has not changed: if George Babbitt once "desired toasters and esteemed Warren Harding," today he "buys iPads and reveres Bill Gates" (xvii). Foregoing the question of whether Microsoft and its billionaire founder have really been "revered" since about 2001, the book does a nice job of calling attention to characters whom students might indeed find a little too distant to identify with: Clyde Griffiths of Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), Carol Kennicott of Lewis's Main Street (1920), and George Willard of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Any teacher frustrated by a lackadaisical response to the most anthologized story in Winesburg, "Hands," can appreciate the need to goad classes into seeing that historical remove is no excuse for not empathizing with Wing Biddlebaum, or in not acknowledging the mob mentality of homophobia that inhibits Wing's yearning for emotional connection. The great strength of Beyond Gatsby is to remind us of how many interesting texts have been overshadowed by Fitzgerald's masterpiece: McParland makes a case for Zane Grey Westerns, Edna Ferber's Show Boat (1926), Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche (1921), Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and Gertrude Atherton's The Crystal Cup (1925), among many others. Of course, for scholars, most of these are familiar names; whether they are taught or studied often enough is a whole different matter.If there is a single precedent for this book, it is probably Frederick J. Hoffman's The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (1949, and revised frequently thereafter), a study that introduced even those of us who would not hit college until the book was thirty-five years old to many of these aforementioned names. Like Hoffman, McParland organizes his volume around trends and topics instead of specific authors, offering sections on postwar disillusionment, war literature, regionalism, urban writing, and history and mythmaking. Some of the texts given attention are curious: Beyond Gatsby concludes with a section on Stephen Vincent Benét's epic poem John Brown's Body (1928), which won the Pulitzer Prize and sold 130,000 copies in 1928 alone (170) but is rarely discussed today, and on John Steinbeck's Cup of Gold, a novel that hardly anyone noticed in 1929 and which not even many Steinbeckians read today. Considering that crime fiction receives a paltry two paragraphs, with Dashiell Hammett barely mentioned and influential novels such as W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar (1929) and Armitage Trail's Scarface (1930) ignored completely, such choices may seem questionable indeed.Some discussion of John S. Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice might have also been useful to introduce students to the era's censorship debates; similarly, a mention of the dubious career of literary pirate and pornographer Samuel Roth and his influence on international copyright law might illuminate the controversies over the supposed indecency of Ulysses (1922) and (later) Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Roth's ugly career certainly demonstrates for readers that not everyone opposed to suppression was a hero fighting for civil liberties. Also curiously missing: Rudolph Valentino and his performance as Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (1921), based on Edith Maude Hull's novel of the same name, the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day. Considering that the novel and film sparked a fad for exoticized Middle Eastern wear and turned the title character into a subcultural synonym for a seductive dandy, it might have been valuable for McParland to spend some time on Hull's influence on romance fiction.That said, McParland does find some novel approaches alongside the expected overviews of the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, and Midwestern literature. A section on "Reading Circles" discusses the rise of book groups and the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club, exploring how formal communities of readers shape public taste (76–79). Another chapter on "Common Readers in Cleveland" looks at the influence of the city's public library on everyday citizens such as Edward D'Alessandro, an otherwise obscure municipal employee whose memoir, The Ginney Block: Reminiscences of an Italian-American Dead-End Street Kid (1988), lovingly describes how boyhood peregrinations to the institution in the 1920s sparked a lifelong love of reading and books (139–44). Here and elsewhere we see McParland's own interest in reception theory at work: a chapter portion on Willa Cather focuses on her relationship with her ideal reader instead of providing a simple career overview, noting how she strove to strike a balance between experimentation and a platonic, friendly intimacy with her audience (116–22). The focus on reception is appropriate, for at all points it reminds us that books were not simply produced in the 1920s but consumed.Fitzgerald scholars may question the book's title, wondering if by "beyond" McParland argues that Gatsby is overemphasized in cultural histories of the 1920s to the detriment of other selections discussed. No such argument is made here, however; the preposition seems designed to encourage younger readers who may be familiar with the novel only from high school or undergraduate courses to peer deeper into the decade, viewing it as representative instead of exceptional. The overview of Fitzgerald's career gives equal emphasis to his popular appeal and his artistic ambitions, providing thorough assessments of both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, as well as Gatsby.Both Batchelor's Gatsby and McParland's Beyond Gatsby are impressively researched and smartly organized. If they address themselves a little too exclusively to beginning literature students, at times alienating seasoned scholars and aficionados, this slight detriment dramatizes the struggle of presuming what a "general reader" may or may not know. Considering how many introductions in the market seem to be written for peers rather than students, it is refreshing to have a pair of classroom resources that classes can actually understand.The challenge of writing an appreciation of a classic work of literature is not all that different from writing an introduction to it. In both cases the main concern is figuring out what tone of instruction to strike with readers in order not to talk down to them while still introducing the widest possible general audience to pertinent facts. Maureen Corrigan's So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures arrives at a propitious cultural moment when appreciations have become a popular genre: in recent years efforts such as William Deresciewicz's A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (2011), Harry Eyres's Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (2013), Alexander McCall Smith's What W. H. Auden Can Do for You (2013), and New Yorker contributing writer Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch (2014), among many others, have appeared on bookshelves. Sometimes dubbed "biblio-memoirs," these books are effectively love letters to great books and writers. They probably owe their mix of autobiography, self-help, and literary criticism to two formative works in the genre, Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel (1997) and Nicholson Baker's U and I: A True Story (1991), about the author of The Mezzanine's unabashed adoration of John Updike. Corrigan's book is chattier and more informal than most of these efforts, sometimes to the point where it can seem less of an argument about the transformative power of literature than a survey of contexts and topics that should make Gatsby interesting to all readers, not just teachers. If it is not as deep of a read as Mead's or certainly De Botton's books are, it nevertheless remains a worthwhile one.Biblio-memoirs do not typically aim to convince audiences that their classic of choice is the uber-read of the Western canon; the relationship between author and reader is more often a wrestling match in which the former pins down the latter through sheer rhetorical pushiness until he or she cries uncle. Accordingly, Corrigan's book begins: "Forget great. The Great Gatsby is the greatest—even if you didn't think so when you had to read it in high school" (3). The buttonholing tone makes sense when she admits a few pages later that much of her thinking about the novel coalesced as she gave presentations on it for the National Endowment for the Arts's Big Read program, where scholar/speakers are encouraged to be entertaining as they elucidate, lest anyone think reading is boring. I suspect serving as a frequent book reviewer for National Public Radio as Corrigan has for many years likewise pressures one to project personality at every turn of phrase. Whatever the inspirations for the sometimes overly caffeinated style (and the corny title), there is thankfully as much substance as salesmanship here for the seasoned Fitzgerald fan. Corrigan's rehearsal of the basics of composition and reception history may embed the more original contributions among familiarities, but a patient read nevertheless rewards.Consider the thesis of her first thematic chapter, "Water, Water, Everywhere": "The great theme running throughout all of Fitzgerald's writing—and his life—is the nobility of the effort to keep one's head above water despite the almost inevitable certainty of drowning" (32). I doubt many veteran scholars would make that assertion; it may be a fairly slick (no pun intended) way of recasting the traditional images of aspiration (or "the upward arc of the dive") and disillusionment (the "drown[ing]" of sorrows), but it is an original recasting nonetheless: "Sink or swim. It's the founding dare of America, this meritocracy where everyone—theoretically, at least—is free to jump in and test the waters" (35). Corrigan then goes on to give a detailed analysis of the variety of tropes of immersion that pop up in Gatsby and other works. Her reading is reliably persuasive and introduces general audiences to choice stories such as "The Swimmers" (1929; Short Stories 510–27) (naturally) and "The Rich Boy" (1926; Short Stories 317–49). Later on she will even connect the Eliotic motif of the drowned sailor in the "Death by Water" section of The Waste Land (1922) to Gatsby, brilliantly connecting both to the image of Joe Gillis (William Holden) floating face down in Norma Desmond's (Gloria Swanson) pool in Sunset Boulevard (1950) (148). Such passages display a commendable variety and range of connections that bolster the case that modernists were deeply attuned to elemental resonances.Another chapter explores the modernity of the New York setting, giving Gatsby initiates a useful overview of the Meyer Wolfshiem controversies and its gangster roots in Arnold Rothstein's colorful role in the city. If this seems pretty basic stuff, the chapter gains interest when Corrigan describes traveling to the Firestone Library at Princeton University to examine Francis Cugat's "Celestial Eyes," the famous cover image of Gatsby, telling the story of how George Schieffelin (a Scribner's cousin) fished the painting out of a carton marked for disposal at the publisher's office and preserved it for many years before its historical value was recognized (110–11). Corrigan also deserves credit for reminding us of the great Willa Cather story "Paul's Case" (1905; Cather 199–234), which used to be a staple of syllabi but which seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years in anthologies, replaced by "A Wagner Matinee" (1906; Cather 235–48) or "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920; Cather 3–74) (88). At times, though, the analysis gives way to aimless storytelling: a long description of taking The Great Gatsby Boat Tour along Long Island Sound grows needlessly critical. I may be biased given this operation is run by Society member (and former webmaster) Eleanor Cox, whom I consider a friend. Literary tourism is an interesting phenomenon with a lot of ambiguities and contradictions about commercialization and commodification to plumb, but you will not find them here—Corrigan merely snipes and snarks, dismissing the adventure as a misleading party-boat ride. Readers interested in deeper insights about the morality of pilgrimaging to literary shrines should give Anne Trubek's A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' House (2011) a try instead.To my liking, the best chapter in the study connects Gatsby to American crime fiction and limns its influence in particular in the hardboiled school. Entitled "Rhapsody in Noir"—a great title!—the section explains to the everyday reader why it is no crime itself to connect An Important Work of Art to popular fiction, suggesting that audiences who think it is inappropriate to draw parallels between the novel and early 1920s' gat-slingers, such as Carroll John Daley's Race Williams and Three Gun Terry, are guilty of "separat[ing] literary categories the way Tom Buchanan segregates races" (128). Scholars, of course, are well accustomed to looking at the gangster backdrop of Gatsby, but it is still a jolt to Big Read attendees to discover that genre writers have long culled allusions from the novel to heighten the import of their plots. One can almost see the weighty gravitas of having to discuss the American Dream lift from their shoulders.In addition to the aforementioned Sunset Boulevard connection, Corrigan connects Fitzgerald to Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930, which is also a Big Read selection), Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), James M. Cain's Double Indemnity (1943), all the way up to Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969) and its subsequent Francis Ford Coppola adaptations. She also spends a great deal of time on the 1949 Alan Ladd version of Gatsby, the most gangster-centric retelling of the novel. She does not merely drop names and chronologies of influence in here: she selects specific images from hardboiled fiction and noir films (such as the deranged "woman behind the steering wheel" motif), showing how they operate both thematically and stylistically for Fitzgerald (146). By the time she wraps it up with a Raymond Chandler quotation that again dramatizes the centrality of the "drowned man" to both the genre and to literature in general ("Too much water, too many drowned men," Chandler once replied when asked why he always wrote with his back to the ocean [160]), one feels the satisfaction of thoroughly researched and connected ideas. Anyone who listens to Corrigan's book reviews on NPR's Fresh Air knows what a great fan of noir she is—she recently did a wonderful piece on the Library of America's Ross Macdonald volume (Corrigan)—but in this chapter one feels the electricity of excitement come alive.As with Batchelor's volume, this book also includes some insightful ruminations on teaching Fitzgerald. In one section, Corrigan even returns to her old high school to rouse students on her firm conviction that Gatsby is not a bore (253–62). The result is both funny and poignant; if it does not quite culminate in an "O Captain! My Captain" moment, à la Dead Poets Society, well, I suspect many of us, too, have fallen far short of sending impressionable young minds screaming from the classroom seeking epiphanies.Again, Batchelor and McParland are valuable for AP high-school students and undergraduates, while Corrigan makes a great gift to explain to one's family why we Fitzgerald scholars have toiled in the fields of West Egg for so long. None of these works may reinvent the genre to which they belong, but they are informative and welcoming reads for Gatsby beginners, and thus highly recommended for library purchase.