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I love The Great Gatsby. I have always loved it, right from when I first read it in the seventh grade, in a way I don't think any of the other twelve-year-olds reading it alongside me did. At the time, I think, it was the language more than anything, because I certainly didn't really understand the story. But Fitzgerald was a master at actual sentence-level prose, and the romance of it all caught at me even without totally understanding it. Because it is a romance, in the end, even if it ends with everyone unhappy; it's just that it's really a romance between Nick and Gatsby.
I love Bright Lights, Big City because it is the same way-- I always used to explain that book as "It's Jay McInerney trying to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. The remarkable thing is that he succeeds at it." It captures a lot of the same feelings and the sentence-level prose is similarly magnificent. (I discovered the existence of Bright Lights, Big City from CSI: NY, where it's used as a thematic element in the episode "American Dreamers." Stella describes it as the story of life in the New York fast lane, and when Mac asks how it ends, she responds, "He gets out, before the city kills him.")
Which means I am absolutely glorying in this moment in which Gatsby is now out of copyright and everyone has decided to dig into the queer retellings, because there is so much there to play with and so many of the people playing with it are such brilliant writers. I don't have words for the way half these stories make me feel... which I know, I am a writer, I should be able to explain it, but as previously mentioned, all my formal creative writing training is plays. My stories are incredibly dialogue-heavy as a result. I generally describe things only as much as I need to for the audience to understand it. Everything is dialogue. So I don't have good description words for the feeling that goes with these stories (although as always there is a burning desire to be able to write like that someday), but they're so beautiful they make my heart hurt half the time, and even with reading them from the library and only buying the ones I want to keep close I'm going to wind up with a shelf full of Gatsby books.
I love Bright Lights, Big City because it is the same way-- I always used to explain that book as "It's Jay McInerney trying to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. The remarkable thing is that he succeeds at it." It captures a lot of the same feelings and the sentence-level prose is similarly magnificent. (I discovered the existence of Bright Lights, Big City from CSI: NY, where it's used as a thematic element in the episode "American Dreamers." Stella describes it as the story of life in the New York fast lane, and when Mac asks how it ends, she responds, "He gets out, before the city kills him.")
Which means I am absolutely glorying in this moment in which Gatsby is now out of copyright and everyone has decided to dig into the queer retellings, because there is so much there to play with and so many of the people playing with it are such brilliant writers. I don't have words for the way half these stories make me feel... which I know, I am a writer, I should be able to explain it, but as previously mentioned, all my formal creative writing training is plays. My stories are incredibly dialogue-heavy as a result. I generally describe things only as much as I need to for the audience to understand it. Everything is dialogue. So I don't have good description words for the feeling that goes with these stories (although as always there is a burning desire to be able to write like that someday), but they're so beautiful they make my heart hurt half the time, and even with reading them from the library and only buying the ones I want to keep close I'm going to wind up with a shelf full of Gatsby books.
