Reading Gatsby with a Lawyer by your Side

                         

          Materialism runs rampant in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes and language etch images of acquisitiveness.  Daisy’s voice is “full of money”; and her tears are evoked by Gatsby’s expensive garments: “They’re such beautiful shirts, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”  Gatsby himself keeps his huge house “always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things.  Celebrated people.”  Tom of course supplements his racism with a crass concentration on status and financial worth.  And narrator Nick’s opening statement is his recollection of his father reminding him of his own advantaged position in life.

         So if you have not been born into privilege and abundance, or had much contact with those conditions (“The rich are different from us”) there is a lot in the ambience and the attitude of The Great Gatsby that would befuddle you.  Reading the text with an Ivy League lawyer by your side might seem guaranteed to strengthen that strangeness.  But not if the lawyer is the right one.  And the right one in the case I will describe here is my daughter who serves weekly as a volunteer tutor for high school girls whose potential for accomplishment is high but whose confidence is not. 

       She had occasion recently to work with a student who was, at first, overwhelmed by The Great Gatsby.  The signal that the young woman was adrift was the significant omission of any mention of her English class as her work load was reviewed.

“So, what’s going in in English?”

“We’re reading The Great Gatsby.  And . . . “I think it’s really hard.”

“So what have you tried to do to help yourself.”

“Well, I got one of those study guides, you know the ones that summarize the story.  But then the teacher asks questions that I haven’t thought of. . .”

“You know, those ‘study guides’ are not a good idea, especially if you’re reading it instead of the novel.   Here’s what I suggest.  Let’s read the book together.  OK?”

“Well, other people have tried that with me.  I don’t know. . .”

“Let’s give it a go.”

      The next week the lawyer walked in, sat down with the young woman, and pulled out a fresh new copy of the text.  The student was stunned.

“That’s not a library book? You bought the book yourself?  It’s the same as mine, the cover’s the same!”

“Sure I bought it. If I used a library copy, I wouldn’t be able to mark it up.”  And the lawyer showed her the annotated pages and marginalia.  The student was amazed that any tutor would have taken her homework that seriously and prepared so fully. 

They set to work on the novel. The lawyer tutor had, in her rereading, underlined and written in the margins of the page.  She noted some words with a “c” (for comprehension) if she thought the student might not have the words in her active vocabulary.  The lawyer was alert to images that were evocative and echoic and attentive to phrases rich in meaning.  The young woman picked up on this.  The feeling that The Great Gatsby is too deep a pool for us to immerse ourselves in is counteracted when we receive the invitation to come in, the water’s fine.  And when that invitation takes the form of an exemplum, i.e., thorough preparation and a working strategy to unpack the density of “a world elsewhere” that is the literary environment of The Great Gatsby, then what transpires and inspires is a propaedeutic, an ontological poetics that encourages the imagination to function as a way of knowing.   That such a level of response can begin to form in new readers is evident in the passage that the student found on her own and spoke to in her class: “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.”  She said she did not fully understand these lines, but she felt the sense of loss in the words.  She had begun to interpret and was learning respect for the text and for her own mind.

 So keep this in mind the next time you start to laugh at another tired lawyer joke.  Yeah, all lawyers are terrible people.  Except when they’re not.  Except when your back is against the wall and you need help.  Except when one sits down with you and helps you to learn.

            By the way, did I mention that the lawyer is my daughter?  Oh, right. I did.  Of course I’m proud and beaming.  Why wouldn’t I be?