H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925) • Hacker News Board

Re: H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

#61

Post by JackFr » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

crclist wrote: post #47

jfengel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I saw what you saw. I was also fortunate not to have it ruined in high school. I didn't read it until my 50s. I just didn't get it. All I see is a bunch of horrible people being stupid and terrible to each other. I don't doubt that that's a very American thing. I just don't want to read about it, no matter how well it's written . Inconsistency note: I love doing Shakespeare, even though it's precisely a bunch…

I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces, and my feeling was "Yuck. These people were all awful." I looked at reviews, and some people thought the same thing, and the others were like "Ha ha ha. These people are all awful. Isn’t this fun?" And I was left wondering whether the two groups of people have had different life experiences. Some have had bitter experience of awful people and it'll never be something to enjoy.

I realize that there is no accounting for taste, but my goodness, A Confederacy of Dunces is laugh-out-loud funny.

Re: H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

#62

Post by keiferski » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #23

Gatsby, like most officially great novels, is the least good of Fitzgerald's books. Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned were way better. There was something about critics of the time who needed to suffer to appreciate anything and it was good of Mencken to hold Fitzgerald to his own standards, but what made authors of the era great were the books that were actually enjoyable. When you look at other a…

John Simon was an excellent critic and probably the closest modern analog to Mencken. He died in 2019.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simon_(critic)

Re: H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

#63

Post by jfengel » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #50

crclist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces, and my feeling was "Yuck. These people were all awful." I looked at reviews, and some people thought the same thing, and the others were like "Ha ha ha. These people are all awful. Isn’t this fun?" And I was left wondering whether the two groups of people have had different life experiences. Some have had bitter experience of awful people and it'll never be something to enjoy.

I lived in New Orleans for a time and read Confederacy of Dunces. Saw it much later as a play. Think it's fantastic. But to your basic point. I was having a conversation with a college friend about series including Orange is the New Black and others that I don't remember--possibly Breaking Bad. And they just couldn't get into a series where you were supposed to sympathize with people who were basically, well, bad to…

There's an interesting comparison to be made between Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad very much wanted you to like its anti-hero even while being an objectively terrible person. Better Call Saul is much less about thrilling to the horrors, but instead hoping that a deeply flawed human being can get better. And he's surrounded by other people who are also good, trying to make him better, and failing.

I don't mean to oversimplify; both are complex shows with extraordinary feats of writing and acting. But I felt Better Call Saul was a more interesting take on the anti-hero because it wasn't just horrible people being mean to each other. If nothing else, comparing and contrasting the differences is a good exercise.

Re: H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

#64

Post by poulsbohemian » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

johndhi wrote: post #24

motohagiography wrote: post #23

Gatsby, like most officially great novels, is the least good of Fitzgerald's books. Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned were way better. There was something about critics of the time who needed to suffer to appreciate anything and it was good of Mencken to hold Fitzgerald to his own standards, but what made authors of the era great were the books that were actually enjoyable. When you look at other a…

Not sure I agree. You, as with most critics actually, seem to be asserting there are clear "quality" lines to be drawn between great novels. IMO we're into the realm of subjectivity here and it's really up to the reader to decide what they like. I didn't like Tender is the Night too much, and I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Do I know…

> I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I think it's in some ways unfortunate the way we have high school students ready things like A Farewell to Arms, maybe For Whom the Bell Tools, or Old Man and the Sea, rather than for example, moving students through more of a progression. For example, you read The Nick Adams stories that Hemingway used as almost "notes" for his later works. There's something gritty and unrefined about the stories, but you can see Hemingway starting to build a style. Islands in the Stream, published posthumously, is more of an insight into how the writer worked than a complete, finished novel. If we are going claim to your students that this Hemingway guy was the great writer of the 20th century, we should at least owe it to them to really demonstrate why.