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THE GREAT GATSBY AND MODERN TIMES, by Ronald Berman. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996, 208 pp., $24.95, $12.95 paper.
THE GREAT GATSBY AND FITZGERALD'S WORLD OF IDEAS, by Ronald Berman. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997, 248 pp., $29.95.
Gertrude Stein, that matriarch of literary modernism, highly esteemed the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet when The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, Stein held her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and counseled the younger writer to make his next book at least that thick. The gesture implied that Gatsby, for all its marvelous merit, was somehow a slight accomplishment. Stein's reservation notwithstanding, scholars for many years have found that The Great Gatsby stands on any shelf of fundamental American literary texts as readily as such stouter volumes as Moby-Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ronald Berman has recently contributed two impressive critical studies to better explain the cultural weight behind the book which poses with such jaunty grace.
The first of these studies, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, makes the case that the novel's deceptively modest dimensions result from its era's aesthetic of economy. Berman connects Fitzgerald's craft to such modernist tendencies as collage and minimalism from painting, the syncopated rhythms of jazz music, the camera techniques of cinema, and the urge toward direct presentation of object which motivated the Imagist poets. Berman presents this extraordinary interfusion of cultural forces through numerous examples, all rendered with calm and cogent authority. The geometrical rendering of Fitzgerald's Manhattan becomes startlingly recognizable as a Mondrian canvas; panning shots, close-ups, and dissolves provide the meaningful vocabulary behind the novelist's narrative presentation of a principal character; the tableau of Tom and Daisy Buchanan sharing a plate of cold fried chicken offers "not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself." Rarely has Fitzgerald's cultural sophistication and modernist heritage been granted the same significant attention as critics routinely accord, say, Ernest Hemingway; but The Great Gatsby and Modern Times shows that Fitzgerald creatively responded to the same new art forms from which Hemingway more self-consciously claimed inspiration.
Berman's meticulous research into the American twenties considers significant popular phenomena of the period, from the reawakened nativism in certain corners of public debate to...