Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. Today we're going to talk about the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Joining me today are Katie Roythe, NYU professor and author of Uncommon Arrangements. Hello, Katie. Hi. And Troy Patterson, Slate's television critic. Hey, Hey. I just want to start by throwing out a very general question. I'm assuming we're all rereading this book. It's such a staple of high school lit classes. And the experience of rereading a book, Troy, I think, can be almost as interesting and revealing as reading it for the first time because you discover what you remember. You discover what you've forgotten, what snags in your memory. You discover how Callow you were the first time you read it. Well, right. No, there's something to that as well. Exactly. It kind of marks your own development in life as much as anything. I want to start with a general question, which is, what is it about a book that is so much about insubstantiality and in itself might be open to the charge of being

insubstantial? It's a very slender book. It almost qualifies as a novello more than a novel.

What is it about this book that gives it its own kind of magnificent permanence in the American

canon of literature, Troy?

Well, Stephen, there are two things.

One is the kind of melting lyricism of the phrases.

I think that sentence by sentence,

it's as good as anything that's been written in this country.

And the other is, no, it doesn't quite feel like a novel, does it?

It's partly because of its length and partly because of its kind of sense of compression. It feels less like a novel than like a fable. Oh, interesting, a fable. I like that. What do you think, Katie? A fable, a novel, a novella, or should we dispense with the genre apparatus? Well, maybe we can dispense with the genre apparatus. I think it's...

I mean, I agree with Troy.

I think it's the sentences

that really make it last.

And, you know, in terms of a novel,

part of the problem is the plot is sort of ridiculous

and gimmicky, in a way,

and incidental in a way,

to the real action of the book.

Yeah.

But I think that it's, it is interesting this reading it as an adult because I think

most people first encounter this book in high school and the adult perspective is really different.

I think we should talk a little bit about that.

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