1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly rapidly.
2. I think it's so popular because it paints a picture of rich people as actually unsuccessful at what really matters to them, depraved, inconsiderate, immoral, and miserable and hollow on the inside. Note how frequently the book is recommended by English professors with no money who generally hate wealthy people - it's like, "see, they're like us, just even worse!"
Worth reading, though, at the very least to see what the fuss is about. It is incredibly well-constructed from a writing standpoint.
I think it's more a fact of describing the life of upper class people. The poor characters are not so well painted too. But they live (or want to live) in the upper class world, in the book. We have only flash of the world of the "poor".
The narrator, also, is from a bourgeois family (Nick graduated from Yale).
So maybe it was just a novel describing a world. A World fading away.
I read Gatsby and came away with two thoughts:
1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly rapidly.
2. I think it's so popular because it paints a picture of rich people as actually unsuccessful at what really matters to them, depraved, inconsiderate, immoral, and miserable and hollow on the inside. Note how frequently the book is recommended by English professors with no money who generally hate wealthy people - it's like, "see, they're like us, just even worse!"
Worth reading, though, at the very least to see what the fuss is about. It is incredibly well-constructed from a writing standpoint.