13. "So we beat on, boats against the current."
100 years of The Great Gatsby, a new India Holton release, and current joys
Dear reader,
The plan for today was to share some of my original poetry, with it being National Poetry Month in the US (as good an excuse as any, right), then gush about the new book in India Holton’s ongoing Love’s Academic series which released on April 8, and round it up with some current joys. I’m still doing the second and the third, but since this April 10 marked the 100-year anniversary of The Great Gatsby, I’ll be sharing an old essay of mine about the classic’s enduring legacy instead of the poetry.
So settle in with your snack and beverage of choice for a very chatty read. With longer issues that I receive, I sometimes prefer (and hence keep in mind while structuring my own lengthier ones) to read in small installments over the course of a few days, even a week; sometimes I even read the sections that interest me more first and catch up with the rest later (and now, if you’re reading via the substack app or in your browser, there’s a small hamburger menu to your left that lists all the sections in any issue that you can jump to or move around between)—it’s entirely upto you, I just hope you enjoy reading it 😊.
Anu Recommends: The Geographer’s Map to Romance by India Holton
She has done it yet again! Check out the “From the archives” section at the very end of this issue for a link to her past interviews for this newsletter, but to refresh your memory, Love’s Academic is India Holton’s ongoing series, set in an alternate version of Victorian England. It’s fantasy, it’s historical fiction, it’s romance, it’s comedy of manners, it’s madcap shenanigans, nerdy playful language-based humour, and witty banter—all in her unique style. I’m definitely the perfect audience for her stories and couldn’t be happier to have discovered such a reliable auto-buy author.
After ornithologists in Book 1, here we have geographers. In a delightful catastrophic mix-up, two experts who are both Dr. Tarrant (more on that imminently) are summoned by the Home Office to investigate a small Welsh village harassed by earth magic; magic, that if not contained in time, could spell disaster for the rest of Britain. As in, BOOM. The only problem is that Professors Tarrant, aka Elodie and Gabriel, of Oxford University have had a failed marriage of convenience a year prior. And have dealt with the near-immediate fallout by fastidiously ignoring each other despite still being legally married…and err also still deeply in love annoyed with the other. Will they be able to put aside the horror of being smitten with your spouse long enough to be the professionals they need to be to resolve said magical eruptions and avert impending doom?
India calls this her Anne of Green Gables X Twisters homage, which should give you a good idea of the book’s mood. This one’s more temperamental and stormier (pun both intended and not) than its more sunshiny predecessor—which is reflected in its magic and, in different ways, within its protagonists. There’s also a lot of intense, slow-burn longing (not to mention the oh-so-sexy mutual respect that they have for each other, masked as it may be underneath the emotional turbulence). Slow-burn only in the sense that they take so long to admit their true feelings—to themselves and each other—and clear up past misunderstandings.
Chaotic but capable Elodie and equally capable but stoic Gabriel (whom we met briefly in Book 1 as he is Devon’s cousin) are wonderful characters despite their stubborn idiocy where feelings are concerned—though the way India writes their mutual pining and internal monologues makes up for the wanting to smack them upside their heads before pushing them towards each other. There is a deadly domesticated goat terror named erm Baby, lots of random magic eruptions turning risk-glutton tourists into livestock, electric-blue thunderstorms, one bed (gasp), and plenty of the best kind of whimsy.
And as is by now an expected part of India Holton’s work, the story doesn’t shy away from discussing difficult, heavy topics, and they are handled with depth but a light touch (this includes the problems in academia), and it features another neurodivergent protagonist dealing with everything that situation entails at a time when it was mostly or completely unknown. The pacing varies, speeding up the most in the final third, while simultaneously setting up the premise of the third (featuring Amelia, Gabriel’s brilliant magical antiquarian sister as one of the leads—I squealed at the sneak peek we got from that book at the end of this one).
Another favourite that I’m grateful I got to read in advance thanks to India’s lovely publicist at Berkley 💚 I’ll never take this privilege for granted!
*Buy print (India) | Buy ebook | Bookshop.org (US)
The enduring legacy of a classic—or why I think The Great Gatsby will always be great
I wrote this essay more than a decade ago, after the Baz Luhrmann adaptation. I then updated it for the book’s 93rd anniversary, seven whole years ago. I’ve made very minor edits to it now, but—and this speaks for itself about its ongoing relevance—I didn’t feel like I needed to substantially change or add anything to it now.
So here goes.
I don’t claim to be an expert on The Great American Novel or the roaring twenties, but The Great Gatsby is a book I’ve been unable to forget. I’m haunted by the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the one that keeps propelling Jay Gatsby towards a future that is already in the past. I’m affected by the sheer hopelessness of the characters, their need to escape and forget demons that will never leave, their attempts at creating a façade that cracks at the first hint of reality and shatters any illusion that they’ve been building up.
Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie version was by no stretch of imagination without its flaws and glaring omissions, yet there is truth behind the seeming superficiality and focus on the exterior. His interpretation may fail to capture many of the layers and brilliance of Fitzgerald’s writing (an area where every cinematic version has failed so far), but the essence of shallowness that permeates everything in the film is not off the mark. A longstanding theme of the novel is its almost complete surrender to material wealth and its lurid comforts. It was a period of excess, of debauchery, of being everyone but yourself, and also ultimately about the stark futility of it all. There is a certain hollowness to the entire production that pays perfect homage to the emptiness felt by the reader at the end of the book, however many times he may have read it. It is something the new version embodies very well, with a modern twist that shows just how compatible the 21st century—commercial, consumerist, material—is with a time Fitzgerald himself titled the Jazz Age. After all, isn’t a carefully crafted and controlled image, money, and the subsequent abuse of power so entrenched in the psyche of our society today? Maybe that’s the reason why we still gravitate towards the text, still try to find meaning, some answers, any answers but fail to come away with anything truly tangible.
At this point I will confess that I hate the characters that populate the world of the story. There are flashes and moments when I felt a sudden pang of sympathy and understanding, but for most of it I wanted them to be woken up from their fake lives and face the reality. Daisy and Tom Buchanan and even lady golfer Jordan Baker for that matter are all careless, selfish people retreating into the safety of their money after destroying the lives of others. Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway were possibly the only two characters I empathised with for a bit longer than the others. The others aroused my curiosity and I wanted to know whether they got their comeuppance (the answer is not really), but it was the two West Egg neighbours who made me want to read on. Yet, I knew that they were hurtling towards an obvious, cruel fate that I was powerless to stop.
Nick’s parting words to Jay, on the brilliant morning that should have heralded a new dawn but instead meant an end of sorts, make you ache with the tragedy of it all; a part of you hoping against hope that it could turn out well after all for this man with the incorruptible dream. It is the only compliment he ever pays Gatsby.
“They're a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
In a (complicated) way he is that. He may have a past that is unsavoury, may have used illegal means to amass his fortune, but everything that he does has one underlying purpose—an undying hope that propels him forward, a hope of one day meeting Daisy again and being given a second chance to live his life the way he really wanted to. Jay desperately wants to recover the person he was back when he first fell in love with Daisy; he has an obsessive passion that the past can be changed, that our current confused course of life can be altered, that if given a chance to go back to “a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was”.
This endears us to him, makes us feel sorry for him once it’s clear that it’s a dream he should have let go long ago. Even his first meeting with Daisy after five long years falls short of the brilliant expectations he has carefully and meticulously built up about her and their life together. But he persists because he must. Without the dream, he is nothing, he has allowed every inch of himself to be consumed by thoughts of the perfect life he believes was snatched away from him.
It is doomed from the start, the seemingly infallible wish that shatters his belief that the American dream means anybody with money can buy himself a new past, can seek redemption. Gatsby is unstable, but we desperately want things to turn out right for him, the same desperation that is mirrored in his every action, word and thought once it is clear even to his delusional mind that his perceived closeness to Daisy (who we realise never deserved his love) is simply that. An illusion. Just like the elusive green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across the bay from Jay’s West Egg opulence designed to woo only her.
It’s doubly intense and tragic as his dream is destroyed twice—once in his youth when Daisy is the one that got away, and secondly (and more poignantly) when he realises that the present was but a fleeting illusion of the attainment of his dream, one that died before it even began.
“He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
This time around he has nothing to fill the gaping emptiness that engulfs him and his purpose of existence.
It’s a common theme throughout the novel. Of all the perceived stylish, cool, rich lifestyles of the rich being a well-constructed façade. But a façade none the less. One that is very fragile, easily exposing the brittle reality behind the unreality.
We are like Nick, who at one of Gatsby’s famed parties finds his perception of the scene changed after some (read, a whole lot) of champagne. Only, instead of champagne, for us it’s the drug of Fitzgerald’s fine prose, the world he’s created, the characters that inhabit it.
Fitzgerald’s masterstroke is in creating a superficial world with unreal characters that still linger far longer in our collective memories that we would ever think. We fall under the spell of this headiness just as Nick numbs his mind with the rest of Long Island’s “flappers and philosophers”, but like them, we must also face the reality once the narrative comes to an end. Accept that the façade will crumble when it is all said and done.
But we also cannot remain unaffected by Gatsby’s wondrous capacity for hope, the hope that Nick carries within him as a result of his father’s advice—“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had”—which is unfortunately defeated in the end by our capacity as humans for cynicism.
The characters in The Great Gatsby themselves ooze an essential loneliness, a listless, rudderless quality that causes them to drift along life clothed in the highest order of superficiality. But it’s a lack of depth that fails in their purpose for adopting it—they cannot hope to escape or truly run away from the demons of their pasts, from expectations, crushed hearts, hopes and dreams. They cannot forget the meaninglessness of their lives in all their desperation.
There is a literary ironic sense in that a lot of Gatsby’s life mirrored that of Fitzgerald himself. He and the Alabama belle Zelda Sayre led a legendary existence for the first half of their lives, embodying all the excesses of that age. But unlike Gatsby who thought he could hold onto his dream forever, Fitzgerald knew it was borrowed time and that, contrary to public opinion, the party would end.
It was just after the publication of The Great Gatsby, in fact, that the lives of the Fitzgeralds started to slowly but surely unravel. Zelda ended up in an asylum and Scott went to Hollywood to build the second great act of his life, not realising that he was already a “forgotten man”.
“Like Gatsby, I have only hope,” he had once said. But just like with Jay Gatsby, it was never meant to be. There would be no second chances for the self-made man who died of a heart attack at the age of 44 with his final novel (The Last Tycoon) unfinished. His rival Hemingway had long ago pegged his talent to be something that Fitzgerald himself didn’t quite understand,
Both his art and life mirrored the same fleeting, ephemeral quality. Just like with Gatsby, where we know what’s to come and yet we cannot stop it or pull away. Like Nick, who finds himself to be an outsider and an insider at the very same moment, we are simultaneously attracted and repelled by the world of Fitzgerald’s creation. A feeling that never really goes away. Maybe because a part of ourselves, much against our intelligence, still wants to believe in the power of second chances, in hope and the fulfillment of wishes, in the myths of the American dream. Even as the haunting depression creeps up on us as the sun sets on Long Island, the sheer emotions of an ultimately hollow narrative overwhelm us and take an inexplicable hold on our minds, hearts and imaginations.
*Buy ebook | Buy ebook (annotated) | Bookshop.org (US)
There are so many print editions of this classic out there; here are buy links for a few of my favourites (India only)*
Hardcover
https://www.amazon.in/Penguin-Select-Classics-Unabridged-Collectors/dp/981520212X/?tag=anushreenande-21
https://www.amazon.in/Great-Gatsby-DELUXE-HARDBOUND/dp/9390183529/?tag=anushreenande-21
Paperback
https://www.amazon.in/Penguin-Select-Classics-Original-Unabridged/dp/9815204335/?tag=anushreenande-21
https://www.amazon.in/Great-Gatsby-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/936144994X/?tag=anushreenande-21
https://www.amazon.in/Great-Gatsby-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141182636/?tag=anushreenande-21
https://www.amazon.in/Great-Gatsby-Collectors-Puffin-Classics/dp/024143257X/?tag=anushreenande-21
Graphic novel
https://www.amazon.in/Great-Gatsby-Graphic-Novel-Adaptation/dp/1406398624/?tag=anushreenande-21
Three things currently bringing me joy
Kokum sarbat and mango season is upon us 😍.
Mum and I watched season 1 of Netflix’s new show, Man on the Inside, based on The Mole Agent, Maite Alberdi’s 2020 documentary. We needed something light and fun—the creator is none other than Michael Schur, of Parks & Rec and The Good Place fame, so we knew we’d be in good hands—and this didn’t disappoint. It was charming, funny, and sweet (Ted Danson as the lonely widower retiree who answers an ad from a private investigator about a missing ruby necklace and goes undercover at a San Francisco retirement community is perfection), but we didn’t expect it to also have the emotional depth it does, broaching taboo topics about ageing, grief, and death with sensitivity and humour. It’s been renewed for a second season, which is great news.
I left this for number three, but it has actually superseded everything. Arsenal winning 3-0 against REAL MADRID on a historic night in N5 on April 8 despite playing without a striker and one of our best defenders. I’ve had Declan Rice’s stupendous freekicks (yes, plural) on loop all week. You can watch them here if you wish. There’s still the second leg to go at the Bernebeu and we all know how difficult the home side will make it (not to mention their pals, the refs and VAR), but until that match kicks off, you’ll find me listening to all the Arsenal podcasts recounting that magical first leg.
From the archives
Had to be this one. India’s second interview for this newsletter, and a review of her then-latest book, The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, the first in the Love’s Academic series.
*Buy print (India) | Buy ebook | Bookshop.org (US)
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Take care and I’ll see you next on April 27!
Anu
*the book buying links I share on here are affiliate links (barring the links for my own published work for which I will earn royalties instead), which means that if you make any purchases through those links, I will receive a small commission from the sale at no additional cost to you.