The Great Gatsby has surpassed my expectations of style. F. Scott Fitzgerald was an imaginative writer. Here’s an excerpt from chapter six:

…[Gatsby’s] heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

Images flash in Gatsby’s mind and so do they in ours. Reading this passage I am reminded of an early sequence in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer that shows the protagonist’s mind hurtling through scientific ideas.

Fitzgerald’s style is at times impressionistic, at times movielike, and at times both. Here’s another Gatsby excerpt from chapter six:

Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the movie-picture director and his Star. They were still under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thing ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.

These two figures and their positions are described so sparely yet vividly. The image is at once like a blurred impressionistic portrait and like a few seconds of black and white film. And so palpably it gleams that it’s surprising to find that word nowhere in the passage.

Fitzgerald renders images in color and motion, too. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, in which he introduces a character at his mansion on Long Island:

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

Again there is a cinematic quality to Fitzgerald’s writing. The camera in the reader’s mind cruises up from the shore and over the luxurious property before it settles on the figure of an imposing, wealthy man. It reminds me of a scene from Sam Raimi’s Send Help – at 1h7m35s or so – shot with a camera that floats through the air over a lush beach before discovering its subjects building a hut near the shore.

An aspect of Fitzgerald’s writing yet to convince me however is his tendency to string together various adjectives and force the reader to create the image themselves. He concludes a compelling initial description of Tom Buchanan with this underwhelming phrase:

I always had the impression that [Tom] approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

What is a harsh, defiant wistfulness? It offers interesting contrast between wistfulness and its leading adjectives, but it doesn’t conjure any specific notion for me. For that, a more obliging reader than me would accept responsibility but I need first to be convinced of a writer’s technical command and artistic diligence. This is the first of Fitzgerald’s writing I have read but I am aware that for short stories he wrote and sold to magazines later in his career critics suspected his motivations to be cynical and predominantly financial.

(Rejected phrasings: This is the first of Fitzgerald’s writing I have read but I am aware that for short stories written later in his career and sold to magazines Fitzgerald was accused by critics for writing… This is the first of Fitzgerald’s writing I have read but I am aware that for short stories written later in his career he was eventually deemed by some critics to be writing purely to sell to magazines and make money. This is the first of Fitzgerald’s writing I have read but I am aware that for short stories he wrote later in his career critics deemed him cynical, writing purely to sell to magazines and make money. This is the first of Fitzgerald’s writing I have read but I am aware that for short stories he wrote later in his career critics suspected the cynical motivation of writing purely to sell to magazines. )

A few paragraphs later, Fitzgerald employs another adjective chain when introducing another character:

…she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came foward into the room.

To make sense of an absurd, charming little laugh I would have to lower my book and try out a few different laughs. Heeheehee. Haaaaa–aaa! Ha! A-ah! Shouldn’t that be Fitzgerald’s job? And, once he’s figured out the salient qualities of a laugh that make it absurd yet charming and little, put it into more precise words? Maybe if I was an aspiring actor I would relish the task as my own.