The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
craft discussion
A typical piece of advice for writers is to “show, don’t tell,” but of course you are able to disregard this completely if you are a clear-eyed genius.
Jordan Baker is my new favorite character in this novel because she’s sort of her own thing. Gatsby is held in contrast Tom. Daisy is weakling and a striver, and Jordan is…something else.
Nick tells us what she is. On my page 58, after mentioning Jordan (probably) cheating at golf, he launches into this:
“Jordan instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.”
He ends there with his brutal assessment of Jordan, but then pivots immediately to this gorgeous nugget:
“It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply —I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.”
___
Wow.
In the first section, the sentence structure is essentially parallel, with three simple, repetitive subjects: Jordan/avoided; She/was; She/wasn’t. The first and third sentences are long, with various clauses and commas, but the second sentence is a bullet, just four words long, wedged in between.
It’s that second sentence that’s so spectacular. It’s like, “let’s cut the shit.” After a big fancy observation, and before that, again, a two- or three-paragraph description of Jordan cheating at golf, Nick just gets to it: “She was incurably dishonest.”
It could just be, “She was dishonest,” but that doesn’t do as much. The meaning is different. That phrasing would mean that her dishonesty was conditional, because dishonesty typically is conditional, or temporary. “She was incurably dishonest” solidifies Jordan as dishonest, now and forever.
Then there’s that last long sentence, which the author has chosen to end with words with contrasting, breezy “o” sounds — “cool” and “insolent” —to describe Jordan’s smile, the paired with “hard” and “jaunty” —the contrast “a” sounds that come across here as practically vulgar.
As a writer, I’ve never thought that plotting was my strong suit, but I love sentences. I love thinking about syntax and diction and, above all, precision when building a sentence. I try always to think about how I can get to the essence of a character in as little space as possible. It’s all right there. Three sentences, perfectly put together.
But there’s more.
Now that Nick has dead-on assessed Jordan Baker, what does he do? Nothing! Because he doesn’t care! He gets it!
Right after this dead-on assessment of Jordan, he gives us a (totally unexpected, I think) dead-on assessment of himself: “I was casually sorry.” (He’s not even all that sorry!) “And then I forgot.”
This is all followed by a little foreshadowing bit, which is also great, but the point of this again is how much is done in so little space here (we learn about Jordan; we learn about Nick; we learn about the condition of being a woman), and how everything (the words, the syntax), is precise and well-chosen.
*A note: it will be a little while until my next post. The next book on the list is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, which is a doorstop at over 800 pages. I’m getting through it!