I’ve talked about books here an embarrassing amount. I love reading, and I’m always looking for another book to savor. I seek out recommendations for the best book possible.

The literary canon has many enduring beautiful books to choose from. Experts have anointed certain books as worthy of attention.

I could name the books I’ve read and recommend. But for a change, I am going to talk about one I can’t stand.

I’ve read The Great Gatsby at least three times. It’s a book professors love to lecture on.

I tried. I don’t like any of the characters and I don’t understand people who do. I tried it again to see if I was missing something.

No. I still hate it. Who are these wretched people and why should I care? The parties in the book sounded glamorous, but that was it.

What lifted this to literature? What did thes professors see that I didn’t?

My husband found an article that gave me a new perspective. Not on the prose, but on the author and how he got attention.

Fitzgerald’s work were not that popular during his lifetime. His high life booze-soaked novels lost appeal during the 1930s prohibition and depression economics. But then an aspiring professor at Princeton named Mizener had gotten hold of Fitzgerald’s papers after he died.

And he produced paper after paper about this author, eventually getting his own faculty position. The article goes on to explain how a number of Princeton people influenced Great Gatsby’s rise to being a classic.

Gatsby himself is doomed to never be good enough to get what he wants. And the darkest side of the Ivy league Princeton snobbery is so vindicated by his exclusion.

It confused me to hear one of my professors call it the great American story. I’ve lived in America my whole life, and I don’t know anybody like those people and I wouldn’t want to.

I’m not saying these kinds of characters don’t’ exist, but they are not common. And I don’t have to like it. Nope, that’s not the America I know and I’m willing to see these lit teachers as unreliable narrators.