Back again, old sport

Monday, 13th February 2012

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers:

‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of the vast Home Counties estate? What the real modern-day equivalent of a Gatsby would be hardly matters.

The novel, with its clear sense that money comes and goes, and that detachment from opulence is as empty a gesture as indulgence in it, seems to come to mind whenever we aren’t doing so well ourselves. It was a big hit at the height of the oil crisis in 1974, when plenty of people must have thought of the arrival of the sheikhs in Bayswater as rather Gatsbyesque.’

The themes of the book are certainly current — that success is transient, that money is simultaneously everything and nothing, and that even the most comfortable people are insecure against fate and hubris. The book’s popularity rises and falls with the fortunes of the stock market, but its subject matter has a timeless quality. I imagine that other adaptations will follow in time.

Blog Tags: America , Economy , Fiction , Film , Money