I’m not surprised that it should come back into fashion.

I’m not surprised by my reaction.

The Great Gatsby is a book that has been on the required reading list for high school juniors as part of American literature, sometimes read by sophomores.

When I was teaching seniors at Muir High School in Pasadena, my colleague had his class read The Great Gatsby. They wrote papers on various themes and characters, and then they put on a party, in full costume of the period, the Jazz Age, where they ate food of the time and drank sparkling cider as champagne and danced the Charleston before the Great Crash of ’29.

The class loved it. Literature came alive.

I tried not to be jealous of the way a fellow teacher could so inspire his students to experience something they would remember for the rest of their lives.

And I read the book myself.

Judgmental me, I tried to sort out my own feelings. The book is an artifact of its time, the heyday of the Robber Barons. The Great Depression is the natural result.

I don’t like the Robber Barons, and I don’t like the Depression that resulted.

I know there are people today who miss those “good times,” the parties of the Super Rich. They think that was the high point in American history.

I think it was a low point. And not just unAmerican, it was antiAmerican.

And the novel, I’m sorry to say, I don’t revere as the Great American Classic.

The reasons are manifold.

There are no characters I can identify with or really like. Fitzgerald reveals his own ambivalence through his alter ego, Nick Carraway, who narrates the story and is torn between attraction and repulsion.

The glitter life of the ultra-rich attracts him, but the people are disappointingly disgusting.

I may try to sympathize with Fitzgerald who seemed unable to resolve his own ambivalence. Mirrored by Nick in the novel, Fitzgerald was drawn to fame and fortune, and pursued his quest to Hollywood which represented for him the Golden Age, where he wrote screenplays, scrambled for fame and money, but after a few years gave up.

And the novel to me was a disappointment.

The Great Heroine, the Love Inherent, Daisy, is shallow, vapid, unappealing. She is unconvincing as the Great Love of Gatsby’s life.

Gatsby himself is a disappointment. He bought his way into the Upper Class to which he does not inherently belong, and is an empty vessel. He is the nouveau riche, but that doesn’t make him of more than passing interest. We, the readers, are supposed to take him at his word, that Daisy is the Goddess of Love that motivates his life. He would do anything to attract her attention, but at the end of the novel he concludes that there’s nothing there, she was nothing special, maybe he was wrong in his Great Obsession, and it doesn’t really matter after all.

The reader (not just this one) has been cheated. Why did you put us (me) through all that twisted agony and then decide that maybe not.

I want my money back.

Those hours of my life, gone.

And Fitzgerald, realizing some of this, ends with a bit of poetic rhetoric out of character, unable to convince himself.

Am I too harsh?

Is my own reaction colored by my rejection of elitism and the Gilded Age?

Because I have experienced better, I don’t want to settle for less.

I’ve been promised a feast (the book has been hailed as disillusionment of the American dream), but I leave hungry.

So when I’ve been dragged back to the Golden Age today and the current Gatsby throws a lavish party which he identifies as such, touted by the pandering media, I dig in my heels and try not to cry in public.