{"id":6734,"date":"2025-04-20T14:55:25","date_gmt":"2025-04-20T21:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=6734"},"modified":"2025-04-20T14:55:26","modified_gmt":"2025-04-20T21:55:26","slug":"not-so-great-american-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2025\/04\/not-so-great-american-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Not so great american novel"},"content":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve talked about books here an embarrassing amount. I love reading, and I\u2019m always looking for another book to savor. I seek out recommendations for the best book possible.<br \/><br \/>The literary canon has many enduring beautiful books to choose from. Experts have anointed certain books as worthy of attention.<br \/><br \/>I could name the books I\u2019ve read and recommend. But for a change, I am going to talk about one I can\u2019t stand.<br \/><br \/>I\u2019ve read The Great Gatsby at least three times. It\u2019s a book professors love to lecture on.<br \/><br \/>I tried. I don\u2019t like any of the characters and I don\u2019t understand people who do. I tried it again to see if I was missing something.<br \/><br \/>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.<br \/><br \/>What lifted this to literature? What did thes professors see that I didn\u2019t?<br \/><br \/>My husband found an article that gave me a new perspective. Not on the prose, but on the author and how he got attention.<br \/><br \/>Fitzgerald\u2019s 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\u2019s papers after he died.<br \/><br \/>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\u2019s rise to being a classic.<br \/><br \/>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.<br \/><br \/>It confused me to hear one of my professors call it the great American story. I\u2019ve lived in America my whole life, and I don\u2019t know anybody like those people and I wouldn\u2019t want to.<br \/><br \/>I\u2019m not saying these kinds of characters don\u2019t\u2019 exist, but they are not common. And I don\u2019t have to like it. Nope, that\u2019s not the America I know and I\u2019m willing to see these lit teachers as unreliable narrators.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve talked about books here an embarrassing amount. I love reading, and I\u2019m 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. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2025\/04\/not-so-great-american-novel\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6735,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734\/revisions\/6735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}