Those of us who had been forced to read it in high school didn't like it then, and didn't like it any better now, having no empathy for the thoroughly unlikable (despicable, really) characters. With those of us who were a touch older and were meeting it for the first time (or who never managed to get far into it very far into it) it fared much better. Here it came across as a snapshot into a world that was long gone but ever present, a world of greed and materialism and riding the bubble as if there were no tomorrow.

I appreciated the writing style - descriptive and virtually poetic - and liked the way he sketched in each main character on their first appearance - arrogant and proprietary, lazy and drifting, or haunted and romantic. Everyone else was indistinguishable, a shallow, grasping mass in an unending party, using Gatsby for whatever they could take him for. There was a slim hope that Daisy and Gatsby's love for each other could transcend this grubby morass, but in the end she showed herself to be the biggest user of them all.

Even Nick, who supposes himself to be the only decent character in the lot and thus fit to judge those hedonistic east coasters, hasn't enough of a backbone to be his own man, but just drifts along with the crowd, drinking himself stupid on other people's booze.