Fourth Time Around

You shouldn't need to have to read a book four times. It's a good thing if you think it's worth reading more than once and I always had The Great Gatsby high on any short list it qualifies for but still kept wondering if I was missing the point.

Mostly read on a return train journey to Swindon, having heard it was recently appointed Best Novel of the Last 100 Years which is since Ulysses, by some who should know I appreciate it more than ever and, notwithstanding that I find a list of Best Novels very hard to do, I am left with the slightly underwhelming accolade for it that if it isn't Gatsby then what is it.

It has the advantage of being short but that extends, as it were, into being concise. It's an exquisitely well-made thing that, if it means anything at all, could be said to aspire to the condition of a lyric poem, gently persuasive, at the distance established in it by having the narrator on the outside of the drama but drawn into it. It shifts, things aren't quite what they seem, fraud is always suspected beneath the shallow glamour and then, necessarily, the party is over.

 

In a way, asking what the best novel since Ulysses is is a bit like asking what the best pop music after, say, the Sex Pistols was or the best classical composer since Beethoven. The art form seemed to have reached a climax and all that came after could only re-work elements of it that had gone before. Poetry after The Waste Land had to acknowledge that it couldn't be done as previously but, like Auden, Larkin and Sylvia, it picked up the pieces and carried on. As did Brahms, Sibelius and Shostakovich. As did Prince.

Gatsby is nothing like Ulysses but is achieved with as much, if a different kind of, art. I've flicked through a few lists of Greatest Novels in search of anything better. For me, Camus is the obvious contender; I think The Catcher in the Rye would still stand up if I read it yet again even in the knowledge of all the objections raised against it but Mrs Dalloway was 1925 and To the Lighthouse was 1927 and so Gatsby is no certainty. 

All those titles come from the first half of the last hundred years and I suspect it's easier to venerate things that have been around for longer. Ishiguro is still at it, as is Murakami and there's no telling with what admiration we might look back on Sarah Waters, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift at his best.

 

I'd be more definite in supporting the claims of Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Auden, Rosemary Tonks, Norman MacCaig and my usual hit parade of favourite poets if we were talking about poetry since The Waste Land but I was glad that the list of novels referred me back to Gatsby one more time because it was even better fourth time around, it made a couple of train journeys better than they would otherwise have been and they might be right.