Gatsby is one of those stories that I basically knew because it's a constantly discussed classic, and then I saw the movie to pretend I really knew what it was about, and then I eventually remembered I had never read the book. And the book is... deceptive, I think.

Fitzgerald wrote a story that is fairly simple, centred around Carraway's interactions with Gatsby and the Buchanans, but at every turn there's more to it. Every character has layers that are slowly peeled back, but their exeunt comes before we see how thick the onion is. Every scene has the immediate happenings as Carraway recalls them, but they also have the quiet parts he doesn't know or doesn't want to know, and they have the parts that happen offscreen that seem just as important.

Even the prose feels deceptive, in that it's so simple and straightforward that it blends into the story yet it has an almost poetic sense of flow and rhythm that keeps you reading even when you hardly feel it.

It's a story where no one, really, is a wholly good person, but depending on where we are in the onion they can appear to be lovely, generous, confident people living their best lives. It's hard not to sympathize with Gatsby and Carraway, and even other characters at times, despite all the dirt the text casually reveals to us. It's easy to forget that Carraway has a fiancee out west as he judges Tom's own infidelities, or that many of the worst rumors about Gatsby are likely the truth.

It hardly seems worth praising this any longer when it's likely one of the most well known and well praised works of Americana in history. But it's worth the praise, and I expect to read it again and again to try and peel back another layer of another character.