In Under the Red White and Blue, Greil Marcus documents the afterlife of The Great Gatsby as a narrative “continually taken up by other artists” and available for “anyone’s consideration of the American subject” (96). Gatsby has become, Marcus argues, “a book that has exerted a gravitational pull so insistent that it can be seen to have colonized the imagination of both its own country and of people imagining the country from anywhere else” (6). Reclaiming America’s founding legacy—or at least one legacy—the book sets out to decolonize and in effect refight the War of Independence by reading America’s perennial culture war as a constant battle between Patriots and Tories, or between “those … on the side of social and economic justice, defined in a manner conventionally rendered as progressive” and “all those perceived … to have resisted such values” (12). In 1975 Marcus, who inaugurated his storied career in the late 1960s as a rock critic at Rolling Stone, began wielding his culture warrior cudgels by taking sides in a larger, encompassing “battle between art and politics.” In his landmark Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll (1975), he enrolled on the patriot side of his fight for democratic justice every “true pop original” and every “good democrat,” most famously pairing Elvis Presley and Walt Whitman as compatriot populists (Mystery 208). In the decades since the book helped inspire a school of interdisciplinary writing about popular art and culture that swaggers with the rhythms and energy of rock music—Mystery Train is now in its sixth edition—Marcus has at once charted and waged this culture war with what Andrew Ross has characterized as a “quirky evangelical zeal” (113).Fitzgerald scholars, of course, will immediately recognize the patriotism-inflected title Marcus chose for his latest book as a loan from Fitzgerald himself. A month before his third novel’s publication on 10 April 1925, Fitzgerald sent a telegram urging his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, to replace the title The Great Gatsby with “Under the Red White and Blue” (11, 28; see also Bruccoli 216). (It was his second request to change the book’s name; he had previously asked for it to be rechristened either “Gold-Hatted Gatsby” or “Trimalchio,” the title under which he had originally submitted the manuscript in late 1924). With this telegram, Marcus argues, Fitzgerald was claiming his place next to Abraham Lincoln (31), Alexander Hamilton, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford (30), among others, as a patriot who “embodies the republic” (26, 30). Just as Marcus has enlisted the writers, leaders, and singers he has spent his career explicating and celebrating, he seems throughout Under the Red White and Blue to be recruiting readers to volunteer for the eclectic “patriot chorus” (31), whose achievement he chronicles.According to Marcus, every member of this chorus has been asking the same question: “What is it that Americans share?” (31). An obvious but heretofore underexamined answer to this inquiry can be found in Gatsby: “A book everyone has heard of” (35). Gatsby, Marcus insists, has become “as much a common memory” for Americans as the Gettysburg Address (68). In this study’s longest chapter, he illustrates the suffusive tenacity of Gatsby by pairing two milestones: comedian Andy Kaufman’s slow-motion, teacherly reading of the beginning of the novel on NBC-TV’s Saturday Night Live on 11 March 1978 and Gatz, a six-hour verbatim reading of the novel staged by the Elevator Repair Service at New York City’s Public Theater in 2010 (53–89). For Marcus, this “common memory” has come to contain multitudes of Gatsby avatars, including Barack Obama, Holden Caulfield, Al Jolson, Bill Clinton, Billy the Kid, prestige cable TV antiheroes such as Mad Men‘s Don Draper and Billions’s Bobby Axelrod, and racial masquerader Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (2000), the last volume in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy, which Marcus spotlighted in his 2006 exploration of American promise and self-invention, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (41–100).Under the Red White and Blue begins with a contrarian intervention into arguments spurred in 2013 by Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Gatsby. As foils to Luhrmann and his cast, Marcus repeatedly skewers earlier screen adaptations of the novel (3, 87, 118, 120, 125, 133) and the “zombie portrayals” of the title character by the lead actors in these productions (71). But before savaging the supposedly living-dead Alan Ladd and Robert Redford, he opens his brief for Luhrmann by reporting on a controversy over the tie-in publication of a new paperback touting Luhrmann’s production. He vilifies a Soho bookseller quoted in a 23 April 2013 New York Times article who averred that “it would be shame” to be seen reading the tie-in paperback, which features a tuxedoed Leonardo DiCaprio on its cover, “on the subway” (2; see Bosman). Marcus treats this reaction as symptomatic of the cognoscenti’s dismay over Luhrmann’s Gatsby. For him, this lone retailer’s run-of-the-mill snobbery represents a full-fledged moral panic. With a memorable rhetorical flourish, Marcus describes “contemptuous” reviewers of Luhrmann’s Gatsby—the type of cultural gatekeepers Emerson in “The Poet” dismisses as “the umpires of taste” (Essays and Lectures 447)—as stirring up a “panic over the kidnapping of a delicate, moral flower of American democracy by a foreign sex trafficker” (4). Thus, the put-upon Sydney-born Luhrmann becomes another voice in the patriot chorus Marcus has spent five decades recruiting and extolling. Luhrmann, he explains, “struck a nerve” because his “movie was what [Fitzgerald’s] book had been searching for all along” (5).Instead of treating Gatsby as a sacrosanct delicacy, Marcus argues for employing it as “a test of citizenship” and as a trigger for the “common conversation” (36) that he traces back to the Declaration of Independence, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Moby-Dick (37). Like Gatsby, he reminds readers, Melville’s epic “did not sell” or garner critical acclaim upon publication (37). Without elaborating, he prompts readers to consider how Raymond Weaver’s recovery of Moby-Dick in Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921) and D. H. Lawrence’s rediscovery of Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) coincided with the action in and composition of Gatsby. Melville aficionados are likely to find Marcus’s range, doggedness, and fervor reminiscent of Charles Olson’s 1947 musings on the “American story” and “THE AMERICAN WAY” writ large and on his fellow Americans’ “democratic” affectations in his similarly digressive and associative Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Herman Melville (11–12, 69).In selecting other narratives that converse with Gatsby, Marcus favors riffs and adaptations like Luhrmann’s that “distort the original without diminishing it.” His case for Luhrmann’s Gatsby rests on a view of the movie as a contribution to “a great common art project … a patriotic project” (9). Luhrmann, “pushing past [Fitzgerald’s] book” (142), offers audiences “a richer work now more open to the reader” (9). As the filmmaker manages to “distort the original without diminishing it,” he rebuts “the coded argument between movies and literature” (93–94) and the vaster “low-high” argument that Marcus made his mark half a century ago staging and subsequently restaging.Under the Red White and Blue makes this case mercurially. Seeming to careen from a 2006 Sopranos episode to the Revolutionary War and the Declaration in the space of a four-sentence paragraph (14) or from Emmett Till to Lady Gaga over the course of a single page (29), Marcus subscribes enthusiastically to Emerson’s advice in “Self-Reliance” that “power resides in the moment of transition” (Essays and Lectures 271). In between these leaps, he barrages readers with salvos of quotation. An extract from Budd Schulberg’s roman à clef The Disenchanted (1950)—a name-drop-packed Jazz Age reminiscence in which the “purposefully transparent Fitzgerald character” Manley Halliday regales Schulberg’s “young left-wing” Shep Stearns with a list of his generation’s cultural landmarks (100–1)—spreads over three pages (101–3). In a section on patriotism, Marcus introduces three long extracts in order to orchestrate an argument among seldom-associated twentieth-century writers. He casts two of them—W. E. B. DuBois and political theorist John H. Schaar (who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, when Marcus enrolled there in 1963)—as “realists” and pits them against Fitzgerald’s Princeton contemporary and Lost Generation man of letters, Edmund Wilson, whom he dubs a desperate “cosily embattled” fantasist and would-be “Fourth of July orator” (24–25).At first glance this dense, triangulated twentieth-century conversation might seem digressive. But in view of Marcus’s forty-five-year effort to rescue America’s “big … complex” Patriot energies from its “big, conformist, faceless, monolithic, and cruel” inertial Tory ethos (28), the voices of DuBois, Scharr, and Wilson foreground the simple impetus underlying the book as a whole. If the catalyst seems to have been the “panic” Luhrmann’s Gatsby provoked, the roll call of citations dramatizes the range of styles, tones, and registers through which the voices of democracy may speak. As different as DuBois, Scharr, and Wilson are, all three preach that “whatever the American reality, or even the American fate, the possibility of such a harmony” as Wilson ecstatically celebrates in his 15 March 1922 New Republic essay, “Night Thoughts in Paris: A Rhapsody” (75–76) “can’t be decently abandoned; the harmony is a necessity if Americans are even to come close to keeping the promises on which America was founded. Those were the promises that flowed instantly from the original justification of America as something new under the sun, the place of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (23). If DuBois and Schaar convey “gloom” in highlighting American failures, Wilson’s rapture offers “a patriotic shock” meant to keep the “leap of faith” of democracy from atrophying into despair (24–25).Marcus’s kinetic, kaleidoscopic voice delivers its own kind of “patriotic shock.” Nearly five decades after Mystery Train, his approach is alternately dazzling, bewildering, and enticing. That first book freed a generation of students and critics to think and write about the songs and movies that inspired and intrigued them with the same rigor and intensity they had been encouraged—indoctrinated?—to bring to literary analyses of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. When it first appeared during the fledgling era of academic American Studies, Mystery Train became a crossover hit and gave aspiring intellectuals, reluctant novice academics (like me), permission to venture or at least peer beyond the Ivory Tower without necessarily abandoning it. The result has been expanded opportunities for publishing analyses of whatever aspect of popular culture—no matter how seemingly frivolous—in venues that once epitomized the elitism of the Western canon. Fifty years ago, Yale University Press would never have published Under the Red White and Blue, let alone its recent biographies of Irving Berlin and Hank Greenberg in its Jewish Lives series (see J. Kaplan and Kurlansky). It does not seem a stretch to attribute much of this Zeitgeist transformation to the precedent Marcus himself has set.Along with his co-editorship with Werner Sollors of the Harvard University Press–sponsored A New Literary History of America (2009), the very titles and subtitles of Marcus’s books after Mystery Train illustrate the breadth and ambition of his career-long project of finding the harmonic convergences between high and low culture: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000). As with these previous volumes, Marcus’s readers in Under the Red White and Blue can continue to enjoy the fruits of his voracious curiosity—to be privy to what Hawthorne in “The Custom House,” the preface to The Scarlet Letter (1850), calls “the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities” (40)—and of his encyclopedic immersion in American narratives, sounds, and images.Not surprisingly considering Marcus’s reputation as America’s preeminent rock critic, his style reverberates with the brio Philip Roth ascribed to “the jumpy beat of American English” (54). Occasionally, though, the writing tries too hard. The “reach” of the argument, as Marcus says in a Browningesque appreciation of a cover of Dave Alvin’s song “4th of July” by the seminal American punk band X, sometimes “falls … far short of its grasp” (19). Consider the syntax of the following sentence, a takedown of E. L. Doctorow’s “bizarre” allegorical updating of Moby-Dick and Wilson’s criticism: Here in Wilson’s steps is the novelist E. L. Doctorow, in 2007, addressing a rant called “The White Whale” to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Doctorow as a devious- cruising Rachel coming across the black carcass of a butchered sperm whale (“It will take more than revelations of an inveterately corrupt [George W. Bush] Administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land”), then trying to find solid ground as the ship pitches on the sea (“Melville in Moby-Dick speaks of reality outracing apprehension … reality as too much for us to take in, as, for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesomely complex white whale”), but the white whale looms up only to disappear and reappear (“It would be good for Utah,” the Salt Lake Tribune announced in an editorial at the end of 2017, “if [Senator Orrin] Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him”), now a new century, now the Constitution and the great white buildings it built, now America’s enemy as Doctorow sights it. (39–40)Marcus makes it clear that his jumpy style is a feature and not a bug by larding his pages throughout the book with numerous, sometimes page-long information-packed footnotes. Like his elaboration of a comparison between the chase scenes at the end of Moby-Dick and the 1968 Steve McQueen action thriller Bullitt (45), these notes often clarify and amplify his analyses. Information about the role of Maxwell Perkins in promoting The Passing of the Great Race by eugenicist and white supremist Madison Grant (65), the model for the book Tom Buchanan recommends in chapter two of Gatsby and the source of Tom’s “stale ideas” (GGVar 25), will enrich readers’ understanding of both Fitzgerald’s own elusive politics and Perkins’s ambiguous role in American literary history. Occasionally, though, these notes become impediments. A page-bottom recommendation of a TV commercial for Ajax cleanser as an opportunity for “subliminally rereading” Moby-Dick (47) and a reminder about The Thin Man star William Powell’s role in the first Gatsby movie (3) reflect an apparent impatience on Marcus’s part to consider how some of his undeniably “interesting” material fits—or may not fit—his argument. After his three-page excerpt of the roll call of 1920s icons Schulberg includes in The Disenchanted, Marcus adds an additional two pages of Jazz Age figures he deems notable (103–4). His epic catalog comes to resemble nothing so much as Nicole Diver’s shopping list in Tender Is the Night (TITN 65–66).In these passages, Marcus seems eager to play the role of the sub-sub-librarian whose “Extracts” open Moby-Dick (xvii–xxvii), a role he at once honors and razzes in his account of Melville’s achievement (48). One of Henry James’s friends once scoffed that the Master chewed more than he bit off (F. Kaplan 235). Marcus, by contrast, seems at several points to have bitten off more than he chews. Nonetheless, the heady amalgam of assertion and anthology will prove essential not only for Gatsby fans and Fitzgerald scholars. All students of American identities and legacies will find a place in the conversations Marcus fosters in Under the Red White and Blue. He seems to have had these students in mind when he reintroduces Fitzgerald’s once-influential friend Gilbert Seldes (107) and Seldes’s pioneering study of jazz, vaudeville, movies, Broadway, and comic strips, The Seven Lively Arts, as a snapshot of 1924 and as a backdrop to Gatsby (116). Whatever readers make of Marcus’s argument and however digressive it seems, students and enthusiasts alike are unlikely to find a livelier point of departure for conversations about “what Americans share” and perhaps about what Americans should share. As Daisy Buchanan’s urge to fondle through Jay Gatsby’s billowing pile of silk shirts (GGVar 112) and her urge to get behind the wheel of his “gorgeous” but “swollen circus wagon” demonstrates (GGVar 76, 145), a surfeit of gifts leaves more to savor and more to ponder than a dearth.