100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby’

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bolvaro.

This is The Daily.

This year, the Great Gatsby turns 100.

Today, Times critic at large A.O.

Scott tells us the story of how an overlooked book by a 28-year-old author eventually became became the great American novel and explores why, all these decades later, we still see ourselves in its pages.

It's Friday, July 25th.

Hey there.

And here he is.

Good afternoon.

Great to see you.

It's so nice to see you.

Yeah.

Should we get started?

Let's do it.

Well, Tony, welcome to the first ever daily book club.

A book club for the two of us, right?

I brought my copy.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, I do want to show it to you.

Oh, it's gorgeous.

It's actually got real texture to it.

Oh, yeah.

It's like it's in black.

It's foil on matte paper.

Wow.

And it's treasured.

That's nice.

Well, I have been through, this is maybe my first

fifth or sixth copy because I've just, I've worn through some.

And then it's always a book that I know I have a copy of and can't find in the chaos of my life and my books.

So I buy another one.

Can I just look at the cover art?

Sure.

There's a flapper.

There's a flapper on the cover and it's got some short stories in there to sort of to pat it out.

Because it's a short book.

It's a short book.

As we will talk about.

Yeah.

So a big reason why we're having this conversation is because this book plays a really big role in my life.

And I don't know how many people have this kind of relationship with the book, but The Great Gatsby is the book that I go back to time and time again.

Not just to read it over and over again, which I have done, but sometimes just to pick it up, open it up, and just kind of pour myself back into it and feel all the feelings.

And,

you know, it does something for me and to me, which I'm hoping this conversation will unlock why it has such a hold on my imagination.

But that is not the only reason we're having this conversation so that this is not entirely about me.

We are having this conversation, you and I,

because this book is celebrating its centennial.

And I want to talk with you about what it's become over the past hundred years, because it's become something.

Oh, yes, it's become a lot of things.

And I want to talk about what it has become in your estimation.

If you had to pick just a single American book that somehow had a representative status, that somehow, if you asked 100 people, not even great American novel, but American novel, the answer would come back somehow.

In most cases, I would wager the Great Gatsby.

And so it's a book that is one of these kind of, I don't know if you call it a mirror or a Rorschach blot.

There's just something in this book that continues to be resonant with an idea that we have about America as Americans.

And I think also as people looking in from the outside, you say, like, what's going on over there?

Maybe reading this book would help us figure it out.

It says something really uniquely American about the American psyche.

Yes.

What it says is a little more complicated, right?

And one of the things about the book that I think partly accounts for this sort of staying power and this fascination and this hold that it has is that even though it's a slender book written by a pretty young novelist, there's

an elusiveness that it has so that you're always kind of chasing after its meaning and maybe never quite catching up to it.

But that keeps it alive, keeps it in play, keeps it something that individual readers often come back to, but that also the collective readership in and out of schools and college classrooms and wherever else and movie theaters keeps coming back to.

Aaron Powell, so let's actually tell the story of this book.

You've started to do this, but perhaps we can do it a little more formally.

How it came to say so much, even if it's not always clear exactly what it's saying.

Yeah, it was F.

Scott Fitzgerald's third book, and he was already a literary celebrity.

He was already kind of one of the voices of his generation and commercially and critically successful.

And in this book, he tells the story through this narrator, Nick Carraway.

A Midwesterner, graduated from Yale and is selling bonds in New York and living out on Long Island in West Egg.

There are two eggs, East Egg and West Egg, and West Egg is the kind of new money side.

And he has a neighbor

who you don't see for a while.

It's like a movie technique of you keep this person off camera for a while.

So you just hear the name Gatsby, Gatsby, Gatsby.

Jay Gatsby, very wealthy, lives in this huge mansion, throws epic parties.

Every weekend in the summer, there's a big party at Gatsby's house.

Yeah, I mean, and when we say epic, we mean...

We mean one of the great details that Fitzgerald uses is, he says, every Friday, these trucks would come in full of oranges and lemons by the hundreds.

And every Monday, the garbage collectors would come and take away the squeezed-out rinds of those oranges and lemons.

So that's just sort of a little piece, if you imagine.

The cocktails required.

Right, the cocktails required to consume a thousand pieces of citrus in the course of a weekend.

And it turns out that Jay Gatsby has been in love with, has been carrying a torch for Daisy Buchanan back before the war.

They knew each other and he has been ardently longing for her all this time.

He was away overseas.

He's come back.

He's made a fortune.

And he's built a whole life and a whole identity as this wealthy fixture of West Egg in order to somehow win her back.

Everything that he's doing, this elaborate, extravagant display, this whole identity he's built for himself, is for that one single romantic purpose.

But when the book was published, people weren't buying that romance.

Critics certainly weren't.

What year is this?

This is 1925, and the reviews are at best tepid, sometimes, some of them quite hostile, and none of them saying that the book has any kind of future.

One of the critics said, this is a book, an amusing book for one season only.

So this is going to be sort of what everyone's going to be reading maybe, you know, at the beach if they read books at the beach in those days.

Yeah, even that turned out to be overly optimistic, right?

Right, right.

So it was, it was a bust.

And

it was kind of a pretty big reversal of fortune for Fitzgerald, who never quite recovered from it.

He did keep writing.

He wrote Tender is the Night, which I think is fantastic.

I mean, that's my favorite of his novels.

We can do another episode on that one someday.

Well, I don't think so.

Okay.

But then, you know, the story is sort of the well-known tragic story of F.

Scott Fitzgerald, you know, going out to Hollywood, falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism by the time of his death, you know, in 1940 was pretty well forgotten.

And so was Gatsby.

And it had faded into kind of obscurity.

And what is its path?

I guess back is the wrong word.

What is its story of rebirth?

It's rebirth.

Yeah.

This is fascinating to me because I'm always interested in, and always have been interested in, this phenomenon of books that are forgotten or misunderstood and then

kind of come back.

In the case of the Great Gatsby, a few things happened.

One of which was that during the Second World War, there were these

Armed Forces editions of various books that were given out with rations.

You know, if you were a GI going overseas, you would get a carton of cigarettes and, you know, a pack of condoms and a copy of a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby.

And I think more than 100,000 of these were printed.

And so...

That's a pretty serious government endorsement, kind of an Oprah book before Oprah.

It's kind of like that, yeah.

And I'm guessing this had something to do with the fact that this book is small, doesn't take up much space, and it's a reminder of home.

And I don't know.

It'd be fascinating to know, you know, who was reading and who was making the selections, but it came back into circulation that way among a wide and one assumes pretty diverse readership of sort of the American soldiers.

And

around the same time and after,

there was an effort in the Academy, but also elsewhere, also in the world of journalism, to define an American identity and an American canon.

Sort of that here was a country that had just emerged from a depression and a war as a great power in the world.

We'd save the world.

For the first time.

And so

who were we and what were the books or the other cultural products that would tell us that, that would give an account of what we were and what we meant.

And pass it on.

And pass it on.

And so there were a lot of efforts to figure that out and to make cases.

And this was when a lot of what we people of later generations, let's say like you and me, grew up as kind of thinking of like, okay, what's American literature?

Oh, there's the Scarlet Letter.

You know, there's Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton,

there's Faulkner, there's Hemingway.

And critics began to rediscover the Great Gatsby.

And so all of these lists, these syllabi,

were being made in the 1940s by a lot of different critics, but it was a much more widespread cultural phenomenon than that.

And partly because at the same time, higher education itself is becoming a mass phenomenon.

You have the GI Bill and you have the enormous expansion of higher education.

And part of that expansion is the expansion of literature, of reading literature.

So more people are just, you know, in terms of raw numbers, but also in terms of it feeling like an important thing to do, reading novels, reading American novels, reading great American novels is

not exactly mass culture, but not specialized high culture either.

It is sort of part of what will come to be known as the great middlebrow of the post-war decades.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, so that's basically the story of how this ends up on my high school syllabus.

Somebody upon high felt it represented the American canon.

And as you just said, it's sufficiently middlebrow to be read by a 16-year-old in North Haven, Connecticut.

Yeah, exactly.

And also in Providence, Rhode Island, where I encountered it.

You know, it's not Moby Dick.

It's, you know, it's a lot shorter.

It's romantic.

It's very readable.

It's a book that high school students can read, can enjoy, can think about.

And it also gives them a lot to think about.

And I don't

mean this to sound kind of diminishing, but it's a book that can generate a lot of term papers and a lot of class discussions.

It's a very teachable book, which is something certainly Fitzgerald was not thinking about when he was writing it, but it turns out to be part of the key to its later longevity.

Right.

And because so many of us encountered it there as part of our education, it just becomes part of the cultural baggage that we carry around.

And since we're talking about American culture, it's been source material for all kinds of adaptations.

Dance me, Jay.

With pleasure.

We have a very special orchestra tonight.

Excuse us, please, sir.

The first film version made in the post-war era era was made in 1949.

Well, who are we to say they should or shouldn't see each other again?

She's married.

Unhappily married.

And rewrote the book because the production code that was in effect at the time could not permit most of what happens in The Great Gatsby to happen on screen.

So it's really, if you've read the book and you watch that version, at a certain point, you'll be like, what?

What?

What?

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man.

But the end thereof are the ways of death.

And it's very sentimental.

sentimental, it's very pious.

It's just, it's not a good movie.

But

I should, at this point, remind people: you were our chief film critic for many years.

I was, yes.

I say this with some authority.

Excuse me.

And then, of course, the next big film adaptation in 1974.

How do you do, old sport?

I'm Gatsby.

Starring Robert Redford at the very peak of his

Redfordness.

Why didn't you wait for me?

Because

rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby.

It's a very solemn, melancholy Gatsby, and it plays very much on the sort of the elusiveness and the sadness that surrounds the character.

On the other hand...

I'm afraid I haven't been a very good host on Sport.

You see...

I'm Gatsby.

Fast forward to 2013, and you have Boz Luhrmann's extravagant version with Leo DiCaprio.

What is your opinion of me anyhow?

My opinion.

Yes, yes, your opinion.

Who is sort of the American movie star of that moment, in a similar way?

And it's not only DiCaprio, who sort of is the magnetic center of the Bas Luhrmann adaptation.

By the time we reached the bridge, I was impossibly confused.

Jay-Z executive produced the soundtrack and, in a way

brought to the surface an idea that had been there for a while, which is of the interesting resonance between Gatsby and hip-hop culture.

And if you think about it, one of the tropes of hip-hop is the self-made.

I mean, if you think of Jay-Z himself.

Somebody who rose from being, you know, a gangster, a drug dealer, from the streets into the pinnacle of wealth and influence.

You can also, I think, hear a lot of Gatsby as the lonely man who has everything but love in, you know, a lot of Drake's work from the mid-2010s.

Still finding myself, let alone a soulmate, I'm just saying.

Feel like we one and the same.

Our relationship changed.

That already never existed.

Then there's this sort of undercurrent where it turns up on television.

Gee, I don't understand.

I thought we were friends.

We were going to open up a money-losing winery together.

On Simpsons episode.

Yeah, this old sport thing.

Is this something you're trying out or is this a keeper?

On Family Guy episodes.

We could be like the Gatsbies.

Didn't they always have like, you know, a bunch of people around?

And they were.

And of course, my own favorite George Costanza on seinfeld a character who it's pretty safe to say has read very few if any books um

he has this whole kind of jag across i think two different episodes where he's obsessed with this idea of being like the gatsby's

i wish we could go back to when we were the gatsby's i want to get it back to when we were the gatsby

still don't know what that means

and you know as anyone who has read the book will know there are no gatsby's there's just one there's just one and he's not even gatsby Gatsby.

The book and the character and just the name have entered into

American commercial culture, American popular culture, and it keeps going.

I mean, we've in a way only scratched the surface, but it's there.

And from the Second World War on, it's always there.

It's always somewhere in lots of different places.

And, you know, shows no signs, I think, of waning,

which is fascinating.

It is.

And we've been tracing here the arc of this book, how it happened, but I'm not quite sure that we've fully explained why,

why as a piece of literature, it's resonated so deeply, what it is about the book, the character, the prose that has made it feel so stunningly American and such an enduring influence.

And that is something, Tony, that we're going to talk about when we come back.

I'm glad I brought my copy.

Me too.

We're going to do some participatory reading.

All right.

We'll be right back.

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So, Tony, let's crack open the book and illustrate why this book is seen and has been seen for so long as the great American novel.

Where do you want to start?

You first.

Well, I would start at a very granular level.

I was just, you know, rereading parts of it before coming to talk to you.

And

there are so many passages where Fitzgerald's almost sort of going towards something that might be sentimental or clichéd and then sort of just twisting back away from it in a kind of lovely and surprising way.

When we're first kind of discovering

some things about the background about James Gatz and how he became Gatsby,

Nick Carraway, the narrator, says, says, the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself.

He was a son of God, a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that.

And he must be about his father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meritricious beauty.

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to invent.

And to this conception, he was faithful to the end.

I mean, here we're sort of at another level where we're describing the psychology of the character and the process of making him, which is both very grand, the platonic conception of himself, a son of God.

So there's something theological about what...

James Gatz is doing to make himself into Jay Gatsby.

And at the same time, there's something juvenile about it.

It's a 17-year-old boy in North Dakota's idea of what a big shot millionaire would be.

And that's who he stayed.

That's who he always was, was a sort of kid's idea of this guy.

And so the complexity of the character and the complexity of the novel lives in descriptions like that and passages like that, where it's working in so many different, almost contradictory directions at once.

And you're getting at this, but the great allure of the book is the question of what animates Gatsby, who he really is,

and what exactly, and this may be somewhat unanswerable, he represents and why that is so American.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Yes, I think that's exactly right, because

his American-ness comes out of this idea of his self-inventedness, this idea that here's this kid out in the sticks in North Dakota who's going to become something else, something better, and who finds his way to that through military service, through criminal activities, through all of these different ways.

So there's something very shrewd and scheming about Gatsby and about his progress through the world, and also at the same time, something very pure and innocent.

So he's always still this boy.

And this is the key that Nick Carraway comes back to again and again in his idea of Gatsby, is that there is a purity and integrity, an absence of corruption.

Even within a character who is profoundly corrupt.

Who's a criminal, right?

Who's in partnership with the guy who fixed the World Series in 1919.

Well, that's what I think we need to talk about here.

American ambivalence around fraud,

criminality, and money

is really central to this book.

And those themes endure.

Absolutely.

They go away to this very moment.

They never go away.

And nor does the kind of tension and confusion about who belongs and who doesn't belong, who's in and who's out.

I think we need to talk about Tom Buchanan, who's the foil, who's the villain in a way.

Daisy's husband.

Daisy's husband.

A Yale man.

A Yale male.

Old, old money.

Old, old money, not a nice guy, philanderer, abuser of women.

Not only that, just, you know, an ignoramus and an outspoken racist.

And in a way, the central triangle in the book is Tom and Gatsby and Daisy.

They're both in love with Daisy.

Daisy is married to Tom.

And

the way that he talks about his great epithet for Gatsby is Mr.

Nobody from Nowhere.

He says, I suppose the thing now is to let Mr.

Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

And so he's upholding a very restrictive, exclusive, pedigreed idea about who's in charge and who's American.

And Gatsby's idea is that, well, Mr.

Nobody from Nowhere is the person who invents the Platonic ideal of himself and creates a self and an identity and a fortune out of nothing or out of whatever ways that he can get to it.

And so the interesting kind of doubleness of the book is on the one hand, there's a question of

who wins, and to spoil it, the answer is Tom wins.

Daisy, even before Gatsby is completely destroyed, Daisy stays with Tom.

Right.

But then there's also the question of whose whose side we're on, whose side the book is on, whose side Nick is on.

And that answer is Jay.

For a long time now, I have been contemplating the Jay Gatsby versus Tom Buchanan conflict in this political and economic moment that we're in.

And let me just put it to you with startling bluntness.

Is President Trump Gatsby or Tom?

And I'll let you kind of imagine why I've even posed that question, because it's infused with new money, anti-establishmentism, and a motto, make America great again, that, to my mind, borrows from, whether it means to or not, one of the great lines in Gatsby, which is when Gatsby says to Nick, you can't repeat the past?

Of course you can.

I mean, what is MAGA other than a pleading to reclaim a past that's so central to this book?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: It's a very interesting question of, I mean, with Trump, is this old money or new money?

What elite does he or doesn't he belong to?

And certainly his own mythology is that he's been, and I think our colleagues have written a lot about this, about his sense of outsider-ness, his sense of the Manhattan elite, the Manhattan establishment, the fancy know-it-alls and eggheads who he was, you know, desperate for a long time to join, join, who always sort of rebuffed him or

went to his parties, right,

but didn't necessarily accept him into their midst.

So, you know, in some ways, he can be on both sides of the question.

I mean, I think from one angle, you look at him and you see the bluster and belligerence and sense of chauvinistic entitlement that aligns him with Tom.

On the other hand, you can also see the striving and also, for that matter, the kind of dubious relation to to sort of norms and laws and conventional ways of doing things that defines Gatsby.

And the love of gold.

Yes.

I don't know if...

And the dislike of alcohol.

Yeah.

But I don't know if there's quite the, I don't quite see the romantic longing.

I don't see it.

I mean, you don't think of Donald Trump as someone who would sacrifice everything in his life for the love of one woman.

Right.

It just seems worth saying that as a country, a country reared on this book, we do seem rather comfortable celebrating and elevating someone

with a clear, repeated public history of deceit and convicted criminality.

Aaron Powell, you're saying it's because of Gatsby.

I don't think it was invented in Gatsby, but I do think that the idea of

self-invention in defiance of all rules and norms and a kind of celebration and romanticization of that impulse, that conman impulse, really, because that's what one of the things that Gatsby is, is a big part of

American life and American politics and American society.

Absolutely.

I want to talk for just a moment about the dissenting case here.

the literary case against this book, because I think it's fair to say so far you and I have been rather fond of this book.

And I think the best dissenting case that I read was from Catherine Schultz.

Yeah.

She wrote it for New York Magazine.

She had many complaints about the book, but I'm going to read the central one.

She writes, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of.

None of its characters are likable.

None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable.

They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent.

Old money, the American dream, organized crime.

She goes on and on.

Right.

She thinks the whole thing's kind of flimsy.

See, I would say, I mean, I think that is a brilliant.

article and sort of must reading because it's sort of the strong case that any Gatsby partisan would have to argue against.

But I actually don't find that.

I find that the characters are much more elusive than that, much more watercolor than the sort of like the bold neon highlighting that she's talking about.

So in some ways, you don't know necessarily what they think or what they feel.

There's a certain inscrutability to their motives and to their behaviors.

But I think that that is kind of what gives the book some of its mystique and helps it sort of cast a spell.

Because I think if they were what she's saying, you know, allegorical figures, not people, but just sort of like walking, talking symbols, billboards, then I don't think that the book would have the kind of staying power that it has.

I don't think that it would be, it still might be taught in schools.

Those term papers might still be assigned.

But I don't think that it would cast a spell in the same way.

And I think that what casts that spell is, as we were talking about before, the gorgeousness gorgeousness of the writing and a sense of the mysteriousness and the strangeness of the people.

Right, right.

And therefore, the thing she points to as the central flaw of the book, in your mind, is in some ways its chief virtue, that this only partially filled canvas allows us to project whatever we need to, whatever we want to, onto the book and about.

America and about ourselves.

That's what I think.

And every time I read it, I'm more convinced of this, is that it's kind of an an open text in a way.

It hasn't entirely,

and Fitzgerald hasn't entirely figured out what it wants to say.

The great virtue of Fitzgerald's is he's not a programmatic thinker.

He's not constructing an argument about this.

He's kind of feeling his way through it.

I think here it's only appropriate that I finally confess.

what I project onto this book.

And for me, the book is about the distance you can travel in your life on a journey of class and social status the entire time on some level knowing that you might be a fraud,

which is very universally American.

And for me, it's the story of being the child of a firefighter who didn't go to college.

And resonantly for this book, where everyone seems to go to Yale, somehow getting into

Yale, a school that my father only knew as a place where students were so kind of practically unintelligent that they would set fires in fireplaces that had no flu because then he'd have to come put them out.

And I got to go there and go on this kind of classifying journey away from my childhood that receded further and further year by year.

Yeah.

And kind of reconciling where you come from and who you are.

And again, that word fraud hovers over it the whole time.

You know,

every time I was in some secret society chamber or at a dinner party in some penthouse apartment in New York City, places I never fathomed I would ever get to in my life, having the question of whether I was passing, right?

And that's,

in some ways, the story of Gatsby.

Now, I wasn't in pursuit of some great singular love.

Mine was a more amorphous ambition.

But Gatslike, I was striving and still strive.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And you use the word striving and also the word passing, which I think is a crucial part of what this book is about.

I mean, in the 1920s, passing meant, in many of those cases, across racial lines, in which people who were by the sort of the racial conventions of the time, black, crossed over and passed as white.

Gatsby is that too, not in an explicitly racial sense, but it is about

coming from one side of a boundary, that's a very real but also invisible boundary, and going over to the other side of it and what that looks like and how that might feel.

What's fascinating to me about the book, and what I identify with, this is an interesting kind of contrast, is I think a lot about the narrator, Nick Carraway.

Here are these two men who can't give an account of themselves.

A reliable one.

A reliable one, right.

Who will either give, you know, in the case of Thomas sort of a dumb and vulgar one, or in the case of Jay, a very sort of like romantic and self-mythologizing one.

And it sort of falls to Nick, well, to figure out what this story is and who these guys are.

And

the question that I have always about the book is that does he succeed?

Does he figure it out?

Is the narrator reliable or is he implicated in the story in ways that that he can't quite take account of?

Aaron Powell, I mean, another way of asking that question is, are you, are any narrators capable of meeting the task?

Right.

And the question about America, in a way, to bring it back to that level, is it even interpretable?

Can we even make sense of it?

Here we have, you know, laid out before us a novel that many people over the years, teachers and students and filmmakers and everyone else, have taken as the book that will help us explain to ourselves who we are.

And the thing that haunts me about this book right now is that it raises the question: is that even possible?

Are the answers that we're looking for even intelligible, even there?

Aaron Ross Powell, I mean, you have perfectly teed up the last thing I want to quote from Gatsby, which is at the end of chapter six.

And it's a question of America.

I think you're the critic.

Fitzgerald describes the moment where Gatsby first kisses Daisy.

It's a long passage.

I won't bore you with all of it.

But when he kisses her, she blossoms for him, Fitzgerald writes, like a flower.

And the incarnation was complete.

But then there's this passage that I have spent years trying to understand.

And the only thing I'm certain of is that it's about America.

Nick Carraway, the narrator, writes that as Gatsby is recounting falling in love with and kissing Daisy for the first time before he sets upon this extraordinary effort to win her back,

even through his appalling sentimentality, Nick writes, I was reminded of something, an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

For a moment, a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth, and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.

But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

End quote.

I have always imagined that the elusive rhythm or the fragment of lost words that he can never communicate is

something

from some American anthem.

Is it America the Beautiful?

Is it our Constitution?

Is it our Declaration of Independence?

It feels like it's something that tells you what America really is.

And Gatsby's entire journey, his ultimately fruitless, tragic effort to reclaim the love he once knew,

this overpowering nostalgia that's not fulfilled, brings forth in our narrator this effort to grasp something American.

that's now lost.

Well, and I think that that...

What is it?

Well, that passage is exactly echoed at the very end of the book.

Because, if you think about it in terms of breath, right?

There's a more famous passage where he talks about the Dutch sailors coming,

seeing this land, Long Island, for the first time.

And

he says, it's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house.

So he's imagining something that isn't there anymore, the forests that were at the edge of the continent that have been cleared away to build these houses, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.

For a transitory, enchanted moment, man must have held his breath, there's the breath again, in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history, for the last time in history, with something commensurate.

to his capacity for wonder.

And that's also an image of America there, but an America is something that is like always lost, always gone.

And I think that that's exactly an echo of the passage that you just read.

So, what's going on here?

Is the American project fundamentally tragic?

It ends up being built on war, slavery, inequity, division.

And maybe our best moment is this transitory moment way in the past when the explorers discover America and all this possibility exists.

But the minute we actually start to make the thing is when we start to ruin it.

Yeah, and that has been part of the American story and part of the American myth.

It's, I mean, it's one of the myths of the frontier, that it's always being pushed back, right?

This boundary, the new possibility that's always tantalizingly ahead of us.

But I think what Fitzgerald is saying, in a way, is that it was doomed from the start, that from the very first moment, all of that tragic

history,

all of that tragic future was written.

Right.

And the moments right before he kisses Daisy are the greatest potential moments of his life.

The minute he kisses her, her, quote, perishable breath becomes real and it all goes downhill.

Right.

And those moments are the same moment in a way.

The sailors looking at the green breast of America and Gatsby leaning in for this great kiss.

And this is the sort of the genius of the novel and why it's both the story of this guy and the story of this nation is that Fitzgerald recognizes that they're the same moment.

We're at this same kind of impossible crux.

Well, Tony,

this has been a real treat.

Old sport, it's been a pleasure.

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Here's what else you need to know today.

In a major announcement on Thursday, French French President Emmanuel Macron said that France would recognize Palestine as a state, making it the first member of the group of seven industrialized nations to do so.

French officials believe that recognizing Palestine as a state now is necessary to give it equal status to Israel as the two sides negotiate the end of their deadly conflict in Gaza.

But the decision puts France at odds with the United States

And

making his first appearance in this arena,

ladies and gentlemen, Hulk Hogan.

Look at that.

He is a Hulk.

Look at that.

320 pounds of him.

Here we go.

Hulk Hogan, whose flamboyance, star power, and bulging biceps helped transform professional wrestling from a low-budget regional attraction into a multi-billion dollar industry, has died at the age of 71.

You know something, maniacs.

Hulk Hogan here, the greatest of all time, with the largest arms in the world, brother.

You know something.

Even after retiring from professional wrestling, Hogan's cultural impact remained enormous.

Last year, shortly after President Trump survived an assassination attempt, Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention, tearing off his shirt to reveal a Trump Vance shirt underneath it.

As an entertainer, I tried to stay out of politics.

But after everything that's happened to our country over the past four years and everything that happened last weekend, I can no longer stay silent.

I'm here tonight because I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko.

It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Alicia Baitu, Marion Lozano, Diane Wa, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to my ninth grade English teacher, Bill Hunter, for introducing me to the great Gatsby as only he could.

That's it for the daily.

I'm Michael Bobaro.

See you on Monday.

What does the future hold for business?

Can someone invent a crystal ball?

Until then, over 42,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one AI cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.

With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities.

Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com/slash nyt.

That's netsuite.com/slash nyt.