Reviews

During the roulette game that decided my higher ed reading curriculum, the ball did not land on The Great Gatsby. Nowadays, my reading list includes several masterworks I have overlooked. How I failed to notice F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece for this long puzzles me. A terse, scathing portrait of the American Dream, The Great Gatsby is as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.

Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby consists of only 47,094 words, which, by modern standards, is more of a novella than a novel. Critics and audiences dismissed Gatsby upon its release, but the novel found a revival during World War II when it circulated among soldiers serving abroad. After the war, Gatsby earned greater scrutiny by scholars and critics. Today, the literary community considers The Great Gatsby “The Great American Novel” because it embodies the development, character, and identity of the American experience, at least partially anyway.

Nick Carraway narrates Gatsby by telling the story of the summer he worked as a bond trader in New York City. He lived in West Egg, the new money area of Long Island, and his cousin, Daisy, lived in East Egg, the old money neighborhood. Daisy’s husband, Tom, is a brooding ex-footballer who’s best days are behind him. Jay Gatsby lives in a mansion next door to Nick’s modest accommodations. Gatsby is in love with Daisy and throws grand parties where strangers stay drunk for weeks. Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the spouse of a mechanic who lives in the Valley of Ashes–the wasteland between Long Island and Manhattan. One day, Daisy accidentally runs over Myrtle with Gatsby’s car. Mr. Wilson thinks Gatsby killed Myrtle so he hunts Gatsby down. Labeled a tragedy, the story ends on a down note.

Without Carraway’s descriptive, poignant narration, the simple summary in the preceding paragraph reads like an episode of Dynasty. Fitzgerald compresses and foreshadows throughout the novel. I particularly liked his placement of the car wreck at the end of chapter three both as a foreshadowing device and as an overall commentary on the American Dream. The wreck, where one of the drunks from one of Gatsby’s opulent parties throws his car into a ditch and loses a wheel, hints at the big wreck later in the novel but also seems to say that the idea that anyone can ascend in society if they just work hard enough is false. Even if someone is able to rise in class, chances are, he or she won’t know how to act and will inevitably meet a disastrous end.

Critics found Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby challenging, but audiences seemed to enjoy it. The film grossed over $300 million and won a couple Oscars for design. I look forward to watching it.

Even though the events of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars take place in a fictional 2020s, where we had landed on Mars already, Robinson’s vision of what colonizing Mars eventually might look like is quite convincing. He bases his inferences about the future on a deep understanding of human nature and probable scientific advancements. Simultaneously fictional and prescient, Red Mars fascinated me at every turn.

Published in September of 1992, Red Mars won the British Science Fiction Association award and the Nebula Award a year later in 1993. Red Mars is the first in a trilogy of novels, followed by Green Mars in 1993 and Blue Mars in 1996. A short story collection, The Martian, released in 1999, complements the collection.

As for the plot . . .many years into the colonization of Mars, Frank Chalmers assassinates John Boone. Then, in flashback, we come understand how Chalmers and Boone developed opposing ideologies as to how Mars should be developed. Chalmers holds a Machiavellian view while Boone had more of an egalitarian position. During that flashback, we learn of the First Hundred, the original colonists of Mars and how they struggled to arrive at and eventually settle on an adverse planet. Eventually, terraforming begins while some of the First Hundred break away and form an underground colony. The middle of the novel turns into a mystery of sorts as John searches for the arch-saboteur of the terraforming project. Meanwhile, Martian scientists discover a way to extend life indefinitely, which accelerates emigration from Earth. Once the Martian space elevator is complete and Frank Chalmers finalizes his political machinations, revolution breaks out and throws Mars into chaos.

Red Mars succeeds through Robinson’s brilliant scientific foresight. It never occurred to me that a space elevator wouldn’t ever really need to be built from the ground up, like a Tower of Babel, but rather, it would only need to descend to the ground from an orbiting anchor. And, if a space elevator were to fail and, say, crash, the cabling could conceivably wrap around the planet several times and cause tremendous destruction in its wake. I also enjoyed the hard science that Robinson boiled into the pages. For example, a Mars year is twice as long as an Earth year. Seasons in the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere span different lengths because of an uneven orbit. These realities influence the narrative.

Because Green Mars was published a year after Red Mars and because Red Mars ends with the beginning of revolution, it seems possible that Robinson may have written both Red Mars and Green Mars as one larger story that the publisher split up in order to avoid trying to sell a 1300 page tome. I’d be good for it, though. I love long books, especially when they immerse you in a probable future.