THE Great American Novel? 
 It comes at or near the top of any list of contenders for The Great American Novel. I knew the 1974 movie with Robert Redford, and have just seen the 2013 version with the marvelous Leonardo di Caprio. So it was about time I actually read the book.... And the result? Absolute endorsement of its extraordinary quality, plus a few surprises. 
 QUALITY. If I were to pick just one aspect of Fitzgerald's writing, I would say his eye for compact detail, especially when describing character. The light fading on Daisy's face "with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." Jordan Baker wearing her evening dresses like sports clothes, "as though she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings." An expression that passes over Gatsby's face "at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words." And that single gruesome detail at Myrtle's death, "her left breast was swinging loose like a flap," marking the realization that this social comedy has been tragedy all along. 
 SURPRISES. First that the book is so short, a mere 180 pages. Virtually everything in the recent movie is in the book, with amazingly little left out. But--in sharp distinction to director Baz Luhrmann's extravagant camp--how compact, one might almost say modest, is Fitzgerald's prose. The set pieces like the first party scene convey the impression of excess without ever resorting to excess in their writing. Yet the book itself is fantasy; not only does the meteoric rise of Gatsby seem impossible, but the timeline of that single summer has its own contradictions. But that is not Fitzgerald's focus; he keeps his characters borne up on airy balloons like Nick's first view of Daisy and Jordan on the white couch. Note how far underground he keeps the criminal world of the Prohibition era, upon which the whole story rests. And how unusual, how risky even, is the rear-loaded storytelling: the book begins with minimal exposition, and almost all the back-story is left to the last third. 
 In that respect, I was surprised by the one extended passage not to appear in the movie at all, the 18-page coda that constitutes Chapter IX. It leaves a nasty taste, but has some interesting purposes. It shows narrator Nick Carraway much more ambivalent towards Gatsby than in either movie. It reveals him as a much colder person, observing, recording, but despising all sides equally. And, in a geographical shift, it takes us away from the wild life of the East Coast to remind us that all the major characters are Midwesterners; "perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common that made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life." So which is the more real, the more admirable? 
 But THE Great American Novel? What are the criteria? Top five on the Goodreads poll, after Gatsby, are To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Grapes of Wrath. All five belong indisputably to their periods. Three of them (Lee, Twain, and Steinbeck) are essentially realistic works grappling with deep faults in American society; I have no trouble accepting the greatness of any of them. The Salinger is curious in that its world, that of a disaffected teenage preppie, is minute by comparison; what it speaks to is less America than the existential ennui of its Zeitgeist. The Fitzgerald, a far better book, also deals on the surface with a minute segment of society, the ultra-rich and the seekers after sensation. Yet its society is curiously fungible: the road from East Egg to Manhattan runs through the Valley of Ashes, and millionaire Tom Buchanan takes his mistress from a garage. The book is often seen as the quintessential portrait of the Jazz Age, and I agree it could only take place at that time. But as a representation of most of America in the twenties, I just don't believe it. A dream itself, it is a portrait of the American Dream and its hollowness. That is why the weary hangover of the final chapter is so important. And that is what makes it a great novel for America even today.