Amazon Presents The Great Gatsby
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on July 6, 2009
Filed Under Advertising, Amazon, fitzgerald-f-scott
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind since. “Bounty! The quicker picker-upper.”
“Whenever you feel like criticising any one,” he also told me, “just remember a little dab’ll do ya and all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Think different.”
He didn’t say any more, betcha can’t eat just one, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, please don’t squeeze the Charmin’, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. Make a run for the border. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, an army of one, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Screw yourself. IKEA. Most of the confidences were unsought — R-O-L-A-I-D-S spells relief — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that Ivory, it floats! An intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon — it’s not TV, it’s HBO — for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. American Airlines. You’re going to like us! Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I’d walk a mile for a Camel. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. Diet Pepsi. Same time tomorrow?
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Say it with flowers. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. You can be sure of Shell. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. All the news that’s fit to print. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. Reach out and touch someone. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. Fly the friendly skies. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. It’s everywhere you want to be. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. Just do it.
(With thanks to Paul Constant for aiding and abetting. Related news here.)
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Yes. Perfect.
A great piece! Thanks a lot.
Frightening. But if you got it, flaunt it.
Ed, you’re a bright and risen angel.
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[...] Amazon Presents The Great Gatsby : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits 'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind since. “Bounty! The quicker picker-upper.” [...]
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