Scott Fitzgerald

I haven’t seen the Kerrigan/Howland/Tysen show yet (I will next week), but the Luhrmann film, despite the bottomless twinkle in Leonardo DiCaprio’s eye, points to a major obstacle in bringing Fitzgerald’s masterpiece to life. So much of what makes the slim novel sing is in the author’s voice, in prose that seems to dance between the raindrops and pulls you into a truly American tragedy before you realize that’s what you’re reading. It’s one of the many rich “Gatsby” ironies: All that irresistibly fizzy prose depicts a rather nightmarish take on the American Dream.

Luhrmann and DiCaprio couldn’t capture it. Nor could director Jack Clayton and star Robert Redford in the somnambulant 1974 film adaptation. Too much was lost in translation, a problem that the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service got around with “Gatz,” a word-for-word reenactment of the novel, set in a drab office, that can run anywhere from 6½ to seven hours.

To me that would be time well spent. I read “Gatsby” every few years, and I find my reasons for doing so evolving as I get older. In my younger and more vulnerable years, to quote the narrator Nick Carraway’s opening words of the novel, I was simply enraptured by the language, the mystery, and, if we’re being honest, the brevity; the book usually checks in at 150 pages, making it an economical re-read. You can’t turn a page of “The Great Gatsby” without coming across a rapturous turn of phrase, and yet those turns are embedded in a novel of almost hardboiled terseness, much as the story’s romance comes wrapped in bitterness. The 1949 movie version, starring Alan Ladd, understood this hardboiled texture, turning the title character into a sort of film noir patsy. Noir, of course, is largely concerned with the futility of outrunning the past. You know. That thing into which we’re borne ceaselessly.

But with the passing years, and my own accumulation of hard knocks, my view of “Gatsby” widens. The outline of Jay Gatsby’s story — young man devotes himself to making money, cliched self-improvement, and criminal activity, all for the sake of wooing the rich girl he has put on a pedestal — reads like a perversion of the American Dream, and an illustration of the self-made man’s tragic limitations. Then — spoiler alert! — he ends up floating dead in a swimming pool, like Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard,” another tale of dreams fading to black. When you’re young, you see in “Gatsby” the wild parties and ritzy wardrobes and jazzy glitter and passionate longing. When you get older, you see the truth. It’s all there, ultimately, which is part of the novel’s magic spell. “Gatsby,” to quote another great noirish movie, “Sweet Smell of Success,” is a cookie full of arsenic.

“Gatsby” was Fitzgerald’s great statement on the Jazz Age — a term he coined — but it could have been written for the current age of greed and narcissism (although previous American generations could make the same argument). Take Tom and Daisy, “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” It’s but a small step to Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley motto of “Move fast and break things,” and it’s no coincidence that Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams called her memoir “Careless People.”

Tom Buchanan was Fitzgerald’s favorite character in the novel, and he remains one of literature’s greatest villains. He’s not just a bully, or a philanderer; he’s also a pseudoscientific racist who subscribes to what would now be called the Great Replacement theory. He rants on about his favorite new book, “The Rise of the Colored Empire.” “It’s up to us,” he insists, “who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Tom misses the days when everyone knew their place. You could say he wants to Make America Great Again.

Daisy, on the other hand, is just a reckless rich girl who breaks hearts, a common enough type in Fitzgerald’s fiction. For starters, check out his short stories “Winter Dreams,” in which the protagonist is strung along by a spoiled young woman who loves the idea of being loved (“I’ve been mad about loads of poor men, and fully intended to marry them all”); and the bonkers “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which a Southern prep schooler falls for a teen whose family owns a mountain-size diamond in Montana. These female characters were Fitzgerald’s type in real life as well. As the novelist Min Jin Lee writes in her introduction to the 2021 Penguin Classics edition of “Gatsby,” “Fitzgerald wanted women who were out of reach, and, paradoxically, he was angry at them for making him reach for them” — not unlike how Gatsby reaches across the water for that green light.

There’s a great deal of life between the lines of “The Great Gatsby,” which may be why stage and film adaptations have struggled to harness the book’s power or move beyond the superficial. We want the lights and the glamour, the gin and the champagne. We want to take a bite of that delicious cookie, without worrying about the arsenic.