Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan just came out with a book of her own. It’s about The Great Gatsby, which Corrigan describes as "the novel that unites us if we’ve been to high school in America.”
Corrigan, who also lectures at Georgetown University, likes to poll her students on which American Novels they read in high school: Most hands go up for Catcher in The Rye. To Kill a Mockingbird? Sure. Moby Dick? Less likely.
But when Corrigan mentions The Great Gatsby, everyone raises his or her hand. “It’s our national novel.”
Full disclosure: I am not a Gatsby fan. I read it in high school, and I re-read it before the movie came out last year. It is not particularly interesting to me.
But here’s a heartening fact: Corrigan didn’t love it at first, either.
“The first time I read it in high school I thought it was a boring novel about rich people,” Corrigan said
Corrigan says by the third time she read it in grad school, she was hooked.
She loves the tone set by Nick, the wistful narrator, ever present, but never the center of the action.
Even the title of her book is an homage to Gatsby—it’s called So We Read On, which is based on the last line of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Corrigan says she doesn’t think anyone really knows exactly what those words mean.
But to her, they’re about a tragically beautiful dichotomy.
“They say something about trying, about effort, about reaching for the stars, about pushing on against all obstacles," Corrigan said. "They also say something about all that effort being doomed, all that effort inevitably ending in failure. I say in my book that Gatsby is about the doomed beauty of trying. and that’s it’s great message for us as Americans.”
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald celebrates Jay Gatsby’s transformation from midwestern modesty to fame and fortune.
But the book also mercilessly looks at Gatsby’s brutal downfall and lonely death.
Corrigan, who is as fascinated by Fitzgerald himself as she is Gatsby, says she looks forward to seeing Asheville for the first time, especially given the author’s connection to the area.
He would visit his wife Zelda at Highland Hospital in Montford,where she was dealing with mental illness. He stayed at the Grove Park Inn for two tumultuous summers in the 30s before he died in California in 1940.
Less than ten years later, Zelda died here.
I always thought Gatsby was accidentally superficial, too artificially shiny. But to think of it as an intentionally glimmering tragedy does make it more alluring.
Maybe the third time’s a charm.
Corrigan will read from, and sign copies of So We Read On tonight at 7 at Malaprop’s bookstore in downtown Asheville.