The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel AdaptationNick: A NovelEl gran GatsbyStepping Out with Scott and Zelda: Touring the Fitzgeralds’ Montgomery

Abstract

As the clock approached midnight on 31 December 2020, commentators fretted endlessly over whether the entry of The Great Gatsby into the public domain would diminish its cultural standing. Already a slew of fresh adaptations—not to be confused with the new editions that James L. W. West III discusses in the preceding review-essay—were competing for media attention. Ready for purchase on New Year’s Day would be illustrated versions, modernized versions, even “mash-up” versions in which the familiar storyline was transposed into another genre, such as Kristen Briggs’s The Great Gatsby Undead, a self-published vampire take on the classic (or “revamped” as the back cover declares). As Annabel Gutterman wrote in Time that Christmas Eve, “When the copyright for Fitzgerald’s classic novel of greed, desire and betrayal expires, anyone will be able to publish the book and adapt it without permission from his literary estate, which has controlled the text for the 80 years since his death. That freedom could yield works that add to Gatsby’s legacy . . . or it could open the door to editions that change the text for the worse.”A year later, it now seems that latter worry was unfounded. Although new retellings are still routinely announced, most of the press surrounding this initial wave of adaptations fizzled out within weeks as literary attention turned elsewhere. In the end, only two twists on the almost ninety-six-year-old tale seem to have had any staying power, perhaps because they dramatize two extremes of adaptation. K. Woodman-Maynard’s The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (the K. stands for Katharine) reveals both the challenges and triumphs of translating a verbal text into images. Meanwhile, Michael Farris Smith’s more controversial Nick illustrates the limits of mining the cultural capital of a famous work by inventing an origin story for a main character. The attention accorded these two works has overshadowed a third type of adaptation, translation, which in 2021 did a steady business, including a new Spanish version of Gatsby in the respected Letras Universales series from the Madrid-based publisher Ediciones Cátedra.Woodman-Maynard’s graphic novel could have come and gone without a ripple considering that a mere six months before its publication the Fitzgerald Estate commissioned its own official adaptation featuring art work by Aya Morton and text adapted by Fred Fordham. As Kirk Curnutt wrote in last year’s Review, “Morton brings more than enough invention to the job to make the adaptation enjoyable,” particularly in her creative visualization of key moments. Her most striking image remains “George Wilson’s stalking of Gatsby,” which “is powerfully dramatic: a wordless frame in which Wilson . . . pulls his pistol while an oblivious Gatsby floats in his pool [that] better represents both men’s pain than any extant film version” (Curnutt 262; see also Fitzgerald, Gatsby Graphic Novel 185). Woodman-Maynard accomplishes the near impossible by first and foremost revealing how differently one can picture both the characters’ physical features and the color scheme and texture of her images. She also captures the Romantic dreaminess of Fitzgerald’s language, with the dramatis personae appearing to float through scenes rather than be tied down by the realism of the rendered settings. (This is especially evocative when Nick first visits his cousin’s house and discovers Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker literally floating above a couch [10–11; GGVar 10]). Her Gatsby is a wholly unique contribution to illustrated versions of the novel, every bit as successful as Morton’s.The most obvious difference between the two is the medium. Morton rendered her images in acrylic, while Woodman-Maynard’s are in watercolor. Her lines are also looser, done more in sketch style than her predecessor’s, which are finer and more exact. Perhaps her most striking innovation is to saturate distinct scenes with different tints to color the mood. Thus, Nick Carraway’s chapter 2 trip with Tom Buchanan into New York City to attend a tacky party with his mistress Myrtle Wilson is dominated by pinks (36–37; GGVar 27–46), while Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy Buchanan in his ornate mansion in chapter 5 is drenched in purples (93–107; GGVar 98–116). The aftermath of Myrtle’s death at the hands of Gatsby’s car (driven by Daisy, of course) in chapter 7 is cast into a light gray shade that conveys the sudden loss of frivolity and gaiety while intensifying the suspense that will culminate in Gatsby’s own murder (172–80; GGVar 163–75), while Nick’s final visit to Gatsby’s abandoned house and his rhapsodic rumination on the naïveté of his friend’s belief in “the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” (GGVar 218), is steeped in a somber slate blue.Although there is no shortage in Gatsby criticism analyzing color symbolism, these are not necessarily the hues one expects to be emphasized in an adaptation. As A. E. Elmore wrote more than a half-century ago, Fitzgerald’s Romantic instinct is to emphasize gold, yellow, and other glittering, iridescent shades: “White, even after one excludes near-synonyms such as silver, makes more appearances in the novel than any other single color, and something like three of every four are applied to East Egg or characters from East Egg, especially to Daisy” (428). Several “drab” and “pale” pigments do appear in the prose, usually characterizing the no-man’s-land between East and West Egg and Manhattan. As Elmore writes, “An overwhelming number of the references in the novel to gray, to other dark colors, and to darkness and dimness themselves are applied to the valley of ashes and its inhabitants” (433). While Woodman-Maynard remains true to certain details—one cannot exactly garb Gatsby in anything other than his trademark “pink suit” (GGVar 146), nor picture him driving a car that is black or brown instead of yellow—her emphasis on lavenders, powder blues, and occasional tangerines adds a unique glow to a familiar palette. As one final sign of her inventiveness, we should note that for a novel that asks whether we should believe in the “green light” (GGVar 218), her Gatsby is almost entirely bereft of viridescent tinctures.Woodman-Maynard also manages to establish her own take on the physiognomy of the characters. Her Jay Gatsby sports a cleft chin that amplifies his charisma, while Nick is thin-lipped in a way that whenever he smiles or frowns seems to make half his mouth disappear. As Curnutt wrote of Morton’s depiction of Daisy, “despite the celluloid examples of Lois Wilson and Betty Field, illustrators for the past several decades have been thoroughly baptized in Mia Farrow’s peroxide” (260), so it is no surprise that the Louisville belle is blonde here as well, albeit more flaxen than aureate.1 Woodman-Maynard envisions Daisy’s nose as much sharper than Morton does, almost like a backwards checkmark, a subtle detail that nicely encapsulates her “cheerful snobbery” without sacrificing the sympathy she deserves as a young woman who, raised without agency, wants “her life shaped now, immediately” by “some force” of “love, of money, of unquestionable practicality” (GGVar 181).If one character seems doomed to typecasting, it is Tom Buchanan. Not that he deserves much pity, but Fitzgerald’s reference to the villain as a “hulking physical specimen” with a “body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (GGVar 15, 8)—almost obliges illustrators to picture him with Brobdingnagian heft. Accordingly, Woodman-Maynard’s philandering husband towers over other characters, his brows often furrowed in vexed confusion and his mouth wrenched open with ire. Each time his presence in these types of adaptations is rendered as domineering, his posture veers toward lumbering, almost as if he were the gorilla-like Moose Malloy in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940). One gains more respect for Bruce Dern’s weaselly performance in Clayton’s 1974 film version of the novel. Dern managed to tap into Tom’s underlying insecurities instead of his entitlement, highlighting less his bullying physique than the “hot whips of panic” that flare up when a simple mind like his is confused (GGVar 149).As Curnutt also noted in his review of Morton’s graphic novel, the greatest challenge any Gatsby illustrator faces is addressing what might politely be called the “Wolfshiem Conundrum.” How, in other words, can a contemporary artist sensitive to the accusations of anti-Semitism surrounding the novel’s shadowy gangster figure depict him without perpetuating bigoted stereotypes, especially those surrounding his “flat-nose” and the “two growths of hair” curling from “either nostril,” as well as Yiddish dialect such as “gonnection”? (GGVar 83, 85). Curnutt suggested Morton may have erred too far from the source material by depicting the coconspirator of the assassinated Rosy Rosenthal and the fixer of the 1918 World Series with an “ash-blond complexion” (Curnutt 261; GGVar 84, 88). This surprising revisualization makes the mobster resemble her depictions of both Gatsby and Tom: “Morton’s strategy of rendering Wolfshiem Anglo is subtler if less globally intriguing” than Baz Luhrmann’s approach to the problem in his 2013 film, which was to cast Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan in the role, “but it also adds its own confusion to the text. If Tom looks like Gatsby’s big brother, then Wolfshiem looks like Tom and Gatsby’s suave-but-shady uncle. The only trait we have to triangulate him between the West Egg/East Egg opposites are the wide splashes of gray at his temples” (Curnutt 261). Woodman-Maynard’s approach to the issue is not to change Wolfshiem’s ethnicity but to allow the broader, looser lines of her sketch style to soften Fitzgerald’s racial tropes into shady indeterminacy. Her gangster is bald and bearded and looks vaguely Eastern European rather than overtly Jewish (74–77). He is also cloaked in shades of heavy blue that keep his features as murky as his criminal enterprises. The approach is effective and successful; it reminds us that organized crime in 1920s New York was run by different ethnic factions, whether Jews, Sicilians, or Irish, and that, even as we recognize the need to be sensitive to treatments of racial difference, not every criminal need comes straight from central casting.Woodman-Maynard also finds her own eye-catching ways of integrating text into her image panels, perhaps one of the biggest issues surrounding the design of graphic novels. We refer here not to characters’ speech bubbles, which convey their dialogue, but to exposition and descriptive passages, two forms of narration that are essential to Fitzgerald’s prose. Although recognizable lines from the novel often appear imposed on scenes, usually tucked in corners or unfurling along panel borders, Woodman-Maynard fits others into objects within her tableaux. When Nick first visits the Buchanans’ impeccable estate, Tom’s imposing stance seems to drip with braggadocious condescension: “‘Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,’ he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are’” (GGVar 9). Woodman-Maynard places these words in the thick shadow Tom’s legs cast on his veranda as he and Nick survey the property’s lush lawn (2).In one of the graphic novel’s most remarkable moments, she places the revelation of Gatsby’s origins at the beginning of chapter 6 (“His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” [GGVar 118]) into the rippling rain puddles that Nick must sidestep as he quietly leaves Gatsby and Daisy to consummate their reunion at the end of chapter 5 (109; GGVar 116). And in another example, at the end of chapter 7, Nick spies Tom and Daisy talking over chicken and ale in their kitchen after Myrtle’s death. Into the fabric of the couple’s flapping curtains (a motif in the novel, of course [GGVar 9–10]), Woodman-Maynard stitches Nick’s famous assessment of their marriage (181), which will now be bound more firmly by secrets than it ever was by love: “They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together” (GGVar 175). The effect is comparable to the use of digital media projection in contemporary performance art and experimental theater, a technique drawn from the pioneering conceptual artwork of Barbara Kruger. Such moments effectively remind us that reading words is no different from “reading” the physical world surrounding us: both are acts of interpretation.In graphic novel adaptations, a large proportion of the source text must be omitted in favor of plot, and often what passages are left out are as telling as those that are included. Like Morton (Gatsby Graphic Novel 34), Woodman-Maynard excises the phantasmagoric description of the valley of ashes at the beginning of chapter 2. Her stark, double-page spread of the “gray land and the spasms of bleak dust” (GGVar 28) may be a little too minimalistic to capture the grotesque, otherworldly wasteland of detritus that Fitzgerald describes. Her depiction of an automobile covered in ash drifts certainly captures the abundant yet amorphous glut of consumer refuse, but most of the rest of the vista is blank, with only a chugging train and a series of industrial smokestacks in the background to indicate we are in an out-of-sight outpost where civilization piles its litter (24–25). More effectively, Woodman-Maynard cuts most of Nick’s tribute to the “racy, adventurous feel” of New York at night that ends chapter 3 (GGVar 69). Instead, she shifts the fledgling romance between Nick and Jordan Baker to the start of her fourth chapter (62–66), using the minimum possible portion of the “bad driver” metaphor that Fitzgerald makes explicit when he has Jordan tell her new beau that because “it takes two to make an accident” that she expects other people to compensate for her recklessness by staying out of her way (GGVar 71).For all the condensing of the romance, Woodman-Maynard still manages to capture the thrill and throb of flirtation, in particular with a gorgeous full-page portrait of the lovers kissing in Manhattan, a romantic image sweetly swathed in yellows and pinks (89). As with most of these adaptations, Woodman-Maynard also does away with the elaborate guest list at Gatsby’s summer parties (GGVar 73–76). More strikingly, she presents Gatsby’s famous 1917 incarnating kiss with Daisy, the flashback that ends chapter 6, with a beautiful rendering of the young lovers embracing passionately on that moonlight-white sidewalk (133). Surrounded by stars, the soldier and the belle are surrealistically enveloped by the blossoming flower that, for Fitzgerald, captures that pivotal moment when Gatsby “wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath” (GGVar 134). The floral motif also reappears in an unexpectedly surreal panel in which the Gloria Swanson-like film star who attends Gatsby’s final party, whom Fitzgerald describes as “a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman” (GGVar 126), is depicted as a literal orchid (119).As with this kiss, Woodman-Maynard’s sketch style has the probably unintended effect of conveying the mutuality of passion: in nearly every buss in the book, lovers’ lip lines disappear and faces blend together until it becomes difficult to tell where one mouth ends and the other begins. The bold adulterous kiss Daisy plants on Gatsby in front of Jordan at the Buchanans’ house as tensions build toward the climactic confrontation with Tom at the Plaza Hotel is particularly effective here: this romantic rendering makes Daisy’s desperation more sympathetic—Tom is on the phone with Myrtle, after all—than Jordan’s condemnation (“What a low, vulgar girl!” [GGVar 139]) allows us to feel in the novel. Overall, Woodman-Maynard does a stellar job of conveying passion and desire.Readers may wonder just how many graphic-novel or illustrated versions of Gatsby we really need, but the great benefit of projects like Morton’s and Woodman-Maynard’s is to remind us of just how differently the novel can be visualized. Gatsby is such an easy novel to stereotype, both its brashness and melancholy demanding the sharp angles of Art Deco and the gaudy chromaticity of Jazz Age fashion and advertising. The official Estate-sanctioned adaptation and Woodman-Maynard’s reimagining find distinct approaches that offer their own individual pleasures; the best compliment we can pay the latter is that even though it was published after Morton’s it never feels secondary or redundant.How readers feel about the origin story that Michael Farris Smith creates in his Gatsby prequel, Nick, will largely depend upon whether they believe adaptations should maintain some kind of umbilical connection to their source material. Usually these sorts of literary “remakes” have a revisionary impetus. Thus, in what may be the most canonical example of rewriting a classic text, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) reimagines the life story of Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the prototypical “madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar 355) locked away as the “insane” first wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In detailing Bertha’s Creole heritage in Jamaica—Rhys redubs the character Antoinette Cosway—the novel redeems her from Rochester’s paternalistic notions of both marriage and sanity, not to mention his racial prejudices against mixed blood.By giving marginalized figures a voice, the central political aim of these reinventions is to refocus narratives away from their predominantly Western and white grounding and install a more global perspective at the center of multicultural storytelling. More recent examples might include Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 best-seller Ahab’s Wife, which brings the spouse of the monomaniacal captain of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) to the forefront, and Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005), which narrates the life of Sadie, the slave wife left behind when Jim and Huck light out on their raft in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1875). Not all of these literary reboots take on fiction. Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (2011) did not create the subgenre of reimagining literary biography through a famous writer’s (often neglected) wife—in this case, the first Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, Hadley Richardson. The million copies her novel sold, though, sparked a gold rush for interesting but overlooked mates of celebrated figures. A decade after McLain’s phenomenal success, it is clear the fad she ignited in publishing peaked circa 2014, yet it remains an entrenched formula, carving out a major niche within historical fiction.Exactly what Smith’s revisionary intent was in retelling Nick Carraway’s story before his 1922 move to West Egg, where he ends up as Jay Gatsby’s neighbor and confidant, remains uncertain. As Maggie Gordon Froehlich demonstrates in the review that follows this one, Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021) recasts Gatsby within our modern-day concerns for racial and sexual inclusivity, placing a bisexual Vietnamese Jordan Baker at the center of the plot and treating its core theme of identity through magic and the supernatural.2 If Vo’s purpose is apparent enough (she delights in both gender and genre blurring), Smith seems to have little conceptual motive. Nick Carraway is hardly representative of a suppressed population, and his first-person narration so dominates Gatsby that it is difficult to imagine what aspects of his personality and experience are silenced by the dominant culture of the East. (He conceals plenty, but that is a different story.) Reviewers of Nick have thus struggled with its raison d’être. Writing for Air Mail, Christian Lorentzen dismissed the end game as purely exploitational: “I say ‘exploit’ because it’s hard to think of Nick as anything other than an opportunistic act of literary vandalism. Smith doesn’t deepen or complicate our understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel or its narrator. Instead, he lifts the urbane future bond trader we know from Gatsby and plops him into a crude historical thriller.” More charitably, Ben Fountain in the New York Times granted the project a bit more creative leeway: Smith intends to give us the B. G. (Before “Gatsby”) version of Nick, though how well this Nick meshes with the Nick we know from “The Great Gatsby” is debatable. Farris’s B. G. Nick seems too hard-used by the war to square neatly with the ironic, bantering Nick who will someday, between the covers of that other book, show up for dinner at the Buchanans’. But such is the power of “Nick” that I found myself hardly caring whether one Nick squares with the other.One suspects Fitzgerald aficionados will not “hardly” care whether this Nick resembles Fitzgerald’s, and the novel’s prospects for achieving some cultural staying power without their fan support is highly doubtful. (McLain shrewdly extended the shelf life of The Paris Wife for years by accepting invitations to speak to any and all Hemingway-related groups.) In his preface to the UK edition (not included in the U.S. edition), Smith suggests that his main attraction to Nick is “his feelings of isolation, of bewilderment” (14). What Nick in the Plaza Hotel scene calls his entry onto “the portentous, menacing road of a new decade” when he suddenly remembers his thirtieth birthday (GGVar 163), the author avers in the preface to the UK edition, need not symbolize a slow ride toward death: “It may be a ‘decade of loneliness’ as Nick predicts. But that loneliness may also manifest itself into the wind that carries” (15). But while Nick undeniably presents himself as “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (GGVar 43), one does not think of him as a figure condemned to solitude, at least not like one does Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). In the end, Smith’s novel will likely be remembered as a curiosity, better remembered for cashing in on an expiring copyright than for creating a dialogue with a classic.It is not that Smith’s initial premise lacks potential. The first third of Nick explores Carraway’s service in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion, Third Division, during the Second Battle of the Marne River in July 1918 (16–126; GGVar 57). Throughout Gatsby, Nick speaks only fleetingly of his experience in combat, referring to the Great War flippantly as “that delayed Teutonic migration” (GGVar 3) and acknowledging only peripherally the “wet, gray little villages in France” that he and Gatsby, who served in the Seventh Infantry, may have passed through during the American Expeditionary Force’s campaign (GGVar 57). As T. S. Licari wrote in the 2019 Fitzgerald Review, Nick’s suppression of his battlefield experience suggests he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Licari’s provocatively rich reading of the connotations of trauma and survivors’ guilt in his narration make a compelling case for reading Gatsby as a story of returning war veterans struggling to process all they have witnessed: Beneath the surface of Nick’s storytelling, . . . lurk memories from the Great War that continue to haunt him years after his return. The famous final line of the novel hints that Nick, like countless other combat veterans before and since, might never escape the horror he witnessed. . . . As with all forms of trauma, the currents of memory perpetually try to carry the sufferer back to a past moment of anxiety, terror, or physical pain. From another perspective, though, the image also evokes the human capacity for healing that distress through the art of storytelling. By narrating their pain and fear, soldiers “beat on” against those memories instead of allowing themselves to be pulled back in time, with recovery coming in the form of the small, perhaps imperceptible strokes that carry them forward, if only a short distance at a time. (229)Smith could have taken advantage of this type of insight and textured his narrative with threads of Fitzgerald’s images, motifs, and irony, creating a precursor narrative that helps us understand Nick’s reactions to events in 1922 as part of his (albeit unconscious) healing process. At the very least, we might expect a moment during the action when the character comes across a cocky decorated captain who earns his “majority” by leading troops to victory in the Argonne (GGVar 180–81), some kind of intertextual connection that begs us to read Nick side by side with Gatsby. If the novel contains such “Easter eggs”—carefully planted allusions or details meant to reward readers for their scrupulous attention—they are hidden far too well. Most likely, they are simply absent, which is why Smith’s basket feels so bare.This is not to say that Nick is not well-written or even entertaining. The Great War section offers a fine account of the psychological distress of armed conflict. Interweaving episodes of bloody combat with a love affair with a French woman named Ella, the novel often reads like a mixture of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Sam Mendes’s devastating 1917 (2019), a film notable for its careful editing to suggest its tense action sequences unfold in a single continuous shot (or two shots, depending on how one defines the illusion). Through his historical research, Smith even offers a fascinatingly tense scene of Nick crawling through a tunnel of the kind we are more apt to associate with the conflict in Vietnam fifty years later (102–6). At its best, the author demonstrates he can write a taut narrative that alternates between the adrenaline of survival and the mundaneness of filling one’s time with cigarettes, alcohol, and meals before the next eruption of violence. One can read Nick alongside a certified contemporary classic of Great War fiction—say, Jeff Shaara’s To the Last Man (2004)—to deem it thoroughly authentic.Where Nick becomes a real head-scratcher, though, is in its second third (133–317). Here, instead of exploring Carraway’s attempted reimmersion into the business world of Saint Paul, Smith dispatches him to New Orleans. This plot twist feels ill-formed given how little fondness Fitzgerald felt for the Crescent City during his short residency there in early 1920 (Bruccoli, Some Sort 130). More confusingly, Smith inveigles Nick in a crime plot with a shadowy cadre of Storyville lowlifes with names like John LaFell (176). Of all of the popular genres Fitzgerald attempted during his career, crime fiction runs a distance fourth to romance, moral lessons (“The Four Fists” [1920; F&P 169–88]), and supernatural tales (“A Short Trip Home” [1927; TAR 107–28]). His two main attempts at it, “The Dance” (1926; ASYM 297–311) and “The Fiend” (1935; TAR 150–56), are exposition-heavy and notably lacking in gun play and fistfights. Nevertheless, Smith turns Nick into a kind of hardboiled observer (and ultimately participant) in the shadowy side of the French Quarter, untangling a tale of revenge that rises from a boiling urban cauldron of prostitution, arson, and murder.Is there any hint whatsoever in Gatsby that Nick nursed his war wounds by hanging out with barkeeps, brothel owners, and petty thieves? Certainly, critics have long recognized that Wolfshiem and Gatsby’s ambiguous dealings in bootlegging and stock and bond manipulation give Fitzgerald’s classic a certain affinity with the emerging gangster novels of the late 1920s and 1930s (Brauer). But nothing in either scene in which Nick speaks with Wolfshiem—their initial luncheon introduction across the street from the “old Metropole” and Nick’s later plea at the Swastika Holding Company for the criminal mastermind to attend Gatsby’s funeral (GGVar 83–89, 204–7)—suggests any previous exposure to such a world. So unrecognizably Nick is Nick in this section one wonders if Smith actually began this descent into hoodlums’ mayhem with a different character in mind and simply redubbed him after Fitzgerald’s narrator as the copyright expiration neared. That possibility seems especially persuasive given that Nick does away with the most beguiling aspect of Nick’s presence in the original novel: his first-person narration. Restricting Carraway to third-person free indirect discourse, Smith gives us a hero that could remain nameless without altering our sense of his identity. He simply has little consanguinity with the Nick we have been known for nearly a century.Ultimately then, Nick feels less like a tribute to Gatsby than to Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931) or Light in August (1932), two grimly violent novels that, regardless of their commentary on racism and sexual assault, are perfectly in tune with the contemporaneous shoot-’em-ups of Dashiell Hammett or, slightly later, Chandler. Smith does excel at creating interesting characters. The New Orleans section is built around Nick’s growing protective feelings for Colette and Judah, an African American couple fractured by the war and caught up in a mutually destructive blood feud. His villains, John LaFell and Kade McCrary, radiate the same nauseating amorality as Faulkner’s Popeye and Joe Christmas, although they lack the grotesque physical and psychological ticks that make these criminals so freakish. (As no reader can forget, Popeye’s impotence compels him to violate Temple Drake with a corncob.) At the same time, his New Orleans in 1919 is a bit chimerical, built out of a few convenient references to street names but without much grounding in historical detail. There is no effort to capture the patois of the city in this era: characters speak a uniformly generic English that seems designed to spare readers any unnecessary challenges that might slow their reading. Overall, Nick is fine, but never more than that.By hitching its wagon to The Great Gatsby, Sm