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.

My favorite few sentences in the book are right near the end. Fitzgerald writes about his home. He begins:

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by.

The passage takes off when Fitzgerald picks out a few choice concrete details:

I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

He ends with an emphatic declaration and several more evocative details:

That’s my Middle West–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.

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.

In other moments Fitzgerald takes on the job himself. Here is his protagonist approaching the scene of a tragic accident just occurred:

I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words “Oh, my God!” uttered over and over in a gasping moan.

We find out the stricken man’s name is Wilson. Fitzgerald elaborates:

Some man was talking to him in a low voice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk back to the light again, and he gave out incessantly his high, horrible call: “Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!”