Reading The Great Gatsby in New Jersey: Responses to Fitzgerald in Richard Ford's Bascombe Trilogy: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006)

Abstract

I. Richard Anderson's essay Gatsby's Long Shadow: Influence and Endurance includes an extensive list of novels and stories which pay homage to the impress of The Great Gatsby (36). The presence of Gatsby in these works ranges from insistent tribute and recognition of Fitzgerald's magnitude of achievement all the way to casually . . . allusive comparison (14). Additions to the list over the past two decades have continued to fall within this range. But the most prominent instance of an account of the reception of The Great Gatsby occurs in a work that does not come under the heading of fiction at all: in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Subtitled A Memoir in Books, the work sets out to detail, along with other contentions of similar nature, a violent contest over the proper way of reading Fitzgerald's in revolutionary Iran. What Nafisi has to say about Nabokov's Lolita in the first section of her book also holds for Fitzgerald's in her second section: it is ultimately the story of how The Great Gatsby gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine [Fitzgerald's] novel (6). The prominent position of Nafisi's book among instances of the reception of The Great Gatsby is due to the obvious clash that exists between the world of fiction (that of the American Twenties) and the world of its readers (that of Revolutionary Iran), a clash of civilizations reflected in the distance in time as well as space between the two worlds.