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

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."

Daisy "needs immediacy, for she dwells in the shallows of time, drifting unrestfully and without purpose from moment to moment."

"Memory is as unreliable as narration, and there was always a new story."

"Nemesis incubating" - Zelda Fitzgerald
"They thought Bacchus was presiding over the festivities, until Nemisis appeared - the retributive goddess whom the Romans aptly called Invidia. Nothing would surive but the stories, the tales of a quest for lasting pleasure, which left a trace of beauty: the disarray of falling stars didn't come to naught after all."