Clare Snow’s Reviews > Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby > Status Update

"Murder happens casually and is forgotten."

"They were all clinging to the wreckage."

I didn't realise Scott & Zelda's last years were so desolate

The reviewers of The Great Gatsby "could only see Fitzgerald's shimmering reproduction of their world's surface, not the way he had also plunged past it, foretelling a nation that would be adulterated by success."

The murders of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills are "riven by questions about money and status and power, erupting into a brutality that is met with incompetence and corruption. It is a story of violence triumphant, of chaos and disappointment. The story of Hall and Mills tells not of America's romantic past, but of its invidious future."

As well as a book about the American dream, The Great Gatsby "is also a story about knowing your place. It is about the brutality of forcing people back into their places, the cruelty of being found out."

"The Great Gatsby is certainly not a true story, nor is it in any meaningful way based on a true story. It might better be regarded as an untrue story, one that took myriad facts and unmade them."

"Fitzgerald's story about possibility is capacious enough to grasp all three possibilities. The creative process pushes the murders of Hall and Mills into the background: the story has been set free to fly into fiction, transposed into a different key, but audible in echoes and harmonic shifts, transfigured from the wretched to the beautiful."

I love this idea

In the 1920s the holocaust's "primary meaning was a sacrificial offering."

"Both pairs of men are discussing parallel cases of unfaithful women. One unfaithful woman is a killer, the other is killed; the men sit amid the ashes and the dust to which they will all return."

The Great Gatsby is a "novel concerned with the tragic consequences of misplaced fidelity, about a man who is destroyed by the colossal vitality of the illusion that has sustained him."