‘Gatsby: My Story’: A Book Review

Nick Carraway and your English lit professor got it all wrong. A madman’s gunshots did not kill the hero of The Great Gatsby, published 90 years ago on April 10, 1925.

The corpse inside the coffin was someone else, a clever ruse. With a “heavyweight team” of FBI men about to nab him, the real Jay Gatsby fled to Havana to grow still richer off illicit booze—closer to the source in the distribution chain. Gatsby got in on the casino action, too. If alive today, he would be thrilled by the bonanzas that the recent thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations might eventually send his way.

So—with the exception of the 21st-century diplomatic update—goes Gatsby: My Story. Michael Spindler’s unauthorized sequel appeared in 2013. Shame on the American literary establishment for overlooking it even if some unpleasant legal questions may arise. Meanwhile don’t worry about my spoiler. Plenty else will keep you reading.

Image

Did you know, for example, that Jay’s memories of Daisy were not as platonic as Carraway led us to believe? Daisy’s father the judge had given her a white Stutz roadster for her 18th birthday. In it she and Jay ventured to “out-of-the way dark places” and “rutted like alley cats and howled nearly as much.” Speaking of judges, Gatsby sees them as more buyable than admirable. In marrying Daisy—a judge‘s daughter from Alabama—Tom Buchanan was slumming it. But then again, in the wake of all the gossip following his “shamelessly public affair” with an Armour heiress, Tom’s choices in Chicago were limited.

Faring no better in Spindler’s sequel is Daisy, “a complete ninny mentally; it was only the brilliance of her smile and the smoothness of her thighs that distracted you from the idiocy of whatever she said.”

By contrast, as a revisionist, Spindler offers encomia for Arnold Rothstein, the real gangster after whom Fitzgerald modeled his Meyer Wolfsheim character. Oh, yes, Rothstein "The Brain" fixed the 1919 World Series—he was hardly crime-free. But Carraway just was not aware of the true origins of the "finest specimens of human molars" that the Wolfsheim character turned into cuff buttons. How could the specimens not be first-rate? They were from the gangster’s own mouth, courtesy his dentist. Spindler’s Wolfsheim/Rothstein just had a good sense of humor and this thing about keeping his body parts away from strangers.

I know. Even more than half a century after Fitzgerald’s death, certain people may hate Spindler’s book, including perhaps some in the Washington area, where Fitzgerald's daughter, Frances “Scottie” Lanahan Smith was a writer in Georgetown. I can understand. No, it isn’t just a matter of respect for a literary giant. Consider the more sympathetic and engaging of the characters he created. Even if Carraway is naive and far from the most reliable of narrators, he comes across as likable, almost a member of the family. My late mother was from the Midwest, not Carraway and Fitzgerald’s Minnesota, but a place close enough in mindset in some ways. For me, at least, The Great Gatsby remains a Great American Novel, easily able to weather Spindler’s revisionism.

That said, let’s not write off Spindler as a literacy parasite. More at SolomonScandals.com—including some legal angles, which are as fascinating as the literary ones. Gatsby: My Story is not on sale at the U.S. site of Amazon, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act just might be a reason.