Great Gatsby

Anyone that has enjoyed shows like Will & Grace will be familiar with the ways that America's self-critiques, especially those targeting its most aimless and superficial citizens, tend to turn into raucous celebrations. The narcisist looking at himself in the mirror one morning might think "omigod, what a minger!", but a narcisist he remains, albeit a minging one.

Having said that, eighty years after the publication of The Great Gatsby you are more likely to find Italians crying over the quality of fine shirts (as Daisy does in Gatsby's bedroom) than most straight Americans.

America (and the idea of America) has played a crucial part in the establishment of the society of the spectacle, but for all my suspicions about the American way of life, the ascendency of semiotic content over the 'real' is arguably more pronounced in the UK. (In the Sunday Times last weekend food critic AA Gill bemoaned that in Britain today "what you eat has less importance than the feeling, the emotion, the idea that you are being into when you sit down.")

Jay Gatsby is man as brand (strictly speaking a re-brand of James Gatz). A "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" is the essence of a personality that has repositioned itself beyond the authentic, that exists in order to pitch the idea of itself to others, and one particular other in particular. This woman, from whom he craves lasting adoration, tellingly compares his always "so cool" surface to "the advertisement of the man".

Even the title of the novel resonates through modern literature like a trademark.

It seems that from the moment he put on a uniform Gatsby discovered that image could be just as important as substance. His own image and reputation has been built by a judicious distribution of isolated facts and mysteries, hypertrophied by a vast and murky wealth, and by simply allowing people to believe extravagant things about him.

My feminist chums at Cambridge used to love laying into Hemingway, but Lady Brett Ashley is a far more sympathetic Jazz Age female than any Fitzgerald has to introduce us to here. Throughout the novel white is the colour of purity and yellow that of corruption, so we know exactly what he thinks of Daisy and perhaps in a sense, all of womankind.

Gatsby strikes me as a bloke's hero - narrator Nick Carraway is moved by his fate because although the object of his romantic invention is ultimately unworthy of him, what he has constructed is a transcendent fantasy which has a value beyond mundane realities. Definitely a masculine conceit.