It's Like This, Old Sport

I am getting myself ready to hear John Harbison's opera version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby by reading the novel itself, for the first time after many, many years.  The narrator, Nick Carraway, is given to saying such portentous things in a pretentious manner that I am quite put off by it, not to mention such obvious narrative devices as  the stand-in for God in the form of the billboard of the oculist with the all seeing eyes looking out at a bleak landscape which are inserted into the narrative lest we forget that this is serious stuff.  There is great symmetry at work here with the respectably wealthy Tom Buchanan, when he isn't spending his large inherited wealth on polo ponies and the like, is exercising his generous libido on his fleshy, vulgar mistress Myrtle, something worth the bother to try out sex with while his ethereal, elegant, and upper class wife, Daisy, is pursued by the arriviste, John Gatz, who has renamed himself Jay Gatsby, as he pursues great wealth, style, and grandeur, all of it to be capped by the treasure of possessing Daisy, who as we can understand from the start, is not the least bit capable of showing genuine affection for anyone, although she is not so wooden, cold, and mechanical as her girlfriend, Jordan Baker, whom the author seems to have introduced for symmetry to be there for Nick as a romantic possibility, who however is an unnecessary diversion to the plot as this reader began to waste time speculating if maybe Miss Baker was a lesbian all along. Myrtle, and her husband John Wilson, who seems to run a car repair shop, are the only two persons capable of showing any genuine feelings for others, even if it is tinged with excessive possessiveness.  Poor Gatsby can look at the expensive jewelry in the shop, so to speak, but, like all the nouveaux riches of this world, cannot ever really possess it.  Being in the nature of a swindler doesn't help either.  It is interesting to see how the MidWestern Fitzgerald reacted to the extraordinary wealth of the East Coast and its flamboyance, something still there to behold in contemporary Manhatttan.  Sometime later he would meet at Cap D'Antibe Gerald and Sarah Murphy, true aristocrats in everything they said and did.  He would use them as models for Nicole and Dick Diver, but never managed to encapsule or demonstrate their nobility of soul in their every act.  Reading the two accounts of their lives Living Well Is The Best Revenge and We Were So Very Young is a better, more honest  experience than anything Fitzgerald ever wrote about the rich.