The Great Gatsby

The novel opens with Nick's father's advice about withholding judgment, and that patient, watchful eye shapes everything that follows. Nick dines in East Egg with his cousin Daisy, whose thrilling, musical voice carries something he can't quite name, and her brutal, restless husband, Tom. He drives through the ash-gray wasteland where the faded eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg stare down from a billboard. And late one night he sees Gatsby alone on his lawn, trembling, arms stretched toward a small green light across dark water.

Fitzgerald's prose is dense and lyrical, cataloging shirts and music and champagne until sudden feeling breaks through: a pile of imported shirts, an antique clock caught in shaking hands, a smile that seems to understand you completely. Around Gatsby move Jordan Baker, the poised and dishonest golfer Nick cautiously courts, and Myrtle Wilson, straining against her life at the edge of the valley of ashes.

"Can't repeat the past?" Gatsby asks, astonished anyone would doubt it. "Of course you can!" What follows is a story about longing that outlasts its object. The summer gleams and then turns, and Nick is left to weigh what one extraordinary capacity for hope is worth among people who watch and gossip and look away.