Fitzgerald's Gatsby Is Still Great at 100

A monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic that fostered the American Dream remains fresh and urgent a century after its appearance

- Somak Ghoshal

I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, for the first time in my early 30s. I had moved to Delhi around that time, rented the tiniest bedsit I could find in the upmarket southern part of the city, my very own version of the seamier West Egg side of Long Island Sound in the novel, and, like Nick Carraway, the Yale-educated but "no-money" narrator of Gatsby (to borrow a phrase from critic Tony Tanner), began getting acquainted with the new- and old-money denizens of the posher East Egg side of the society I had thrown myself into.

I had a sense of turning a corner in my life, like Nick, who turns 30 in the course of the novel, and his epiphanic line about that momentous event struck a chord with me: "Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning air."

Recently re-reading the novel after an interval of nearly 15 years, I was amused by my youthful indulgences, which, in a sense, captures the essence of what Gatsby is all about. When it came out exactly 100 years ago, it portrayed a generation of men and women and their excesses, not just material but also psychological, during the so-called The Roaring Twenties.

The 1920s were a time of boundless hedonism. A flamboyant sense of optimism coursed through the air during those inter-war years, which would presage The Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by World War II. A century later, the capitalist effluence that Fitzgerald described in his novel is even more pronounced—watch the limited series,