Gatsby flopped. Fitzgerald kept writing.

Kitamura's Audition calls for the same intelligence.

Hello readers,

The Great Gatsby turned 100 last week. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking The Great Gatsby was a failure. Today, it’s one of the most celebrated novels in American literature. A hundred years later, Gatsby’s legacy still influences how Americans think about success, failure, and self-invention. But what does it mean that both versions—the flop and the success—are true?

This tension between performing, in the sense of acting to accomplish something, and the performance— how the intended audience receives and judges the result— and what we are to make of that feedback to the self, also surfaces in Katie Kitamura’s haunting new novel Audition which reads like a modern dramatization of Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up.

Two Realities of Gatsby

There are two ways to view Gatsby. First, there’s its success today. This book has been read (or listened to with appalling frequency) by multiple generations– over 25 million copies sold, still in print.

Then there’s the reality that when Gatsby was published in 1925, it did not sell well.

There were no likeable female characters and it was considered excessively violent. Women drove the fiction market then too, and they weren’t buying it. It took years to sell the original printing of around 20,000. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, the modest second printing of The Great Gatsby was mostly rotting in Scribner’s warehouse. His last royalty check was for the unlucky amount of $13.13.

In his day, Fitzgerald’s wunderkind success and rise to glamour stemmed from his first book, This Side of Paradise, and his subsequent marriage to Zelda, who became known as the original flapper. She had previously turned down his proposal because she did not believe he could provide for her in the style to which she had been accustomed. Their antics filled the gossip pages.

Gatsby received mixed critical reviews. Its modest-to-poor commercial reception was the beginning of a different reality for its author. With the general woes of the Great Depression and the popularity of the movie industry on top of it, he had descended into a financial, mental and spiritual breakdown.

A First-Rate Intelligence Loses It

To understand this reality, we have to talk about The Crack -Up, a collection of essays, with additional letters and notes added by the editors posthumously, anchored around three pieces published in Esquire (February, March and April, 1936). When he wrote them, Fitzgerald was 39 and reflecting on his own Gatsby-ish rise and fall.

In the titular piece, Fitzgerald famously attributed his early success to this philosophy:

“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

He started out a writer knowing it was likely futile to believe he could be published let alone become great as a middle class midwesterner, and invited to join the ranks of literary society. He knew even if he did, it would never lead to the kind of fame and power available to men in other fields. Yet he found the struggle necessary anyway. In this fake-it-’til-you-make-it way, he managed to achieve what he had believed impossible.¹ 

Without getting too deep into the specifics (alcoholism, infidelities, wife in an asylum– the cause and effect among these debated among the couple’s friends and biographers), these essays grapple with the fallout from personal failings that over ten years had consumed his energy and his career. He contrasts external pressures, “the ones you remember and blame things on and in moments of weakness tell your friends about” with the blow to identity that comes from within, the kind “you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize… that you will never be as good a man again.” 

How does he really know he is cracking up? He finds himself performing in interactions with others based only on “what I remembered I should do, from other days.”  The Esquire series recounts parallel experiences that required him to re-evaluate the male role that he would play (football player, soldier, writer) and he declares that with each new role, he became a different person. Now his self is “like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found there was nothing he wanted to do.” 

Eventually, he accepts a friend’s counter that “The world exists only in your eyes...through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say it’s not you that’s cracked–it’s the Grand Canyon.” He realizes it doesn’t matter if he feels like it or not, or whether people want to read his novel or not, whether he thinks film is an inferior art form or not. He must return to his identity as a writer and get back to work. 

A Flop Turned Classic

Four years after Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, Gatsby was chosen as one of 100 or so novels to be printed in a special edition designed to fit in a soldier’s front pocket. At least 150,000 copies of Gatsby were sent to the troops. It proved popular and that’s why we are still reading it today.

Which of these versions of Gatsby, or of Fitzgerald, is real? Is it a mediocre novel, a flop, the work of a loser as Fitzgerald and his contemporaries experienced it? Or is what happened in the second act after Fitzgerald died, our experience of celebrating this author and novel today as a necessary rite for anyone who cares about American literature, essential to understanding the American Dream and its disillusionment, the real story? How grimly sardonic the god, that first-rate intelligence, who would create a world in which both versions are true.

A Modern Test of Intelligence: Katie Kitamura’s Audition

If you find this interesting, you will probably love Katie Kitamura’s Audition. Just as Fitzgerald wrestled with the gap between intention and perception—between who he was and who the world saw—so too does the narrator of Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a haunting novel that bends reality and performance into something difficult to untangle. It’s a book divided in two parts, narrated by an unnamed 49-year-old actress. At the hinge, the story shifts to a different plane of reality. The basic facts of her life and work may not be what we, including the narrator, perceive.

This is a novel that assumes a first-rate intelligence on the part of the reader, rewarding the one who proceeds through ambiguity that will frustrate many. On the surface, the characters in each part do similar mundane things: eat breakfast, walk together, share meals in restaurants, offer each other drinks, confer about scenes in a play, talk about writing. But in the second part, there’s an uncanny shift in how they relate to each other, echoed in their relationship to recurring objects– a scarf that belonged to one character now belongs to another, pastries and alcohol take on new significance. 

Intent vs. Impact

The reader who pays close attention will be helped along to make sense of the competing narratives. Remembered scenes from the narrator’s past or retold anecdotes aid in interpreting the rituals, words, gestures and incremental pauses that make up the novel’s immediate timeline within the flowing river of a lifetime.

For example, during the narrator’s first coffee encounter with Xavier, a theater student half her age who feels a particular connection to her, she recalls to herself an incident in which she disclosed to a journalist that she’d had an abortion. The journalist neglected to use the word “abortion” in the published profile, instead referring to “giving up a child,” practically ensuring the reader’s interpretation of the facts. She also recalls another private truth, which she considers one of the most difficult experiences of her life, a second pregnancy which she has mentioned to no one but her husband, which ended in miscarriage before she had made up her mind about whether or not to abort.

A few pages later, Xavier is working as an assistant on the set of the narrator’s upcoming play. He asks her whether it really matters if she feels her performance in a scene is right, as long as the audience perceives it as good. The narrator responds that it matters, because “without intentionality, there was no agency, no control, the work was happening to you. An impossible inversion.” I began to understand what this character and this book was all about– to be authentic, we must choose and play our roles with total control, even when no one but us knows what’s up. And here’s we have a woman who never really decided whether she would play the role most often expected of a woman, the role of mother, or not. So is this even possible?

This grounding gave me something to stand on as the second half of the book tilted its world sideways. But it is not the possible reading. 

Kitamura’s Thematic Trilogy: A Deeper Dive into Audition

Another way to get ahold of Audition is to focus on what the narrator thinks about her career.  She has managed to achieve renown as a non-white actress who might have been typecast, she recalls early advice from an agent to change her name to one that would capitalize on her racially indeterminate features to get meatier parts:

 “Parts– a word that implied there were parts and then there was a whole, in which those parts might cohere, a whole that might be a play, or a film or a series, a whole that might even be a career, a body of work that could exist in the public imagination.

Of course, I was not indeterminate to myself and I did not change my name.”

Fans of Kitamura’s backlist could take this as a clue to read Audition as a contribution aimed at creating a coherent body of work. So many of the themes and questions in Audition recalled my experience reading her prior novel Intimacies (2021). But when I finished it, I had not yet read A Separation (2017) and so this inkling that Audition was meant as a part of a greater whole created something of a reading emergency for me that sent me to three different used bookstores to get a copy. 

As with Audition and Intimacies, I finished A Separation within 24 hours of starting it. I can confirm: Kitamura’s project relies on a the not-young but not-old unnamed female narrator working in role that requires her to precisely interpret the work of others for an audience (translator, interpreter, actress). In all three books, significant scenes take place in an environment where staying in character and knowing the rituals is critical to how the environment functions (hotel, court, theater and many restaurants).  All use these characters and environments to explore themes of passivity, perception and secrecy within intimate relationships, self-delusion, and complicity.

The books don’t make up a true series; the characters and worlds are distinct. But together they feel like a thematic trilogy, which makes for another intriguing way to process the ambiguity within Audition. 

Navigating Through Uncertainty: It’s the Point

Some readers will be very disappointed because this book raises more questions than answers within its pages. I have feeling the sales will not match the critical response. But if you’ve ever been deep in a lake of doubts about whether the truth in art or love or self resides in the intention behind our efforts, the impact on others, or in the interpretation/dumb luck that mediates between both shores, this book may put the wind at your back.

Now what?

• If this post respected your intelligence, please share it.
  

• Got insomnia? You might like the essay “Sleeping and Waking” from The Crack-Up. Or check out Blake Allen’s Insomnia, a mash up of classical strings, opera and musical theater that juxtaposes the words of Fitzgerald’s essay with a story of an insomniac in a present-day dystopian New York. I can’t promise you’ll sleep better but his will remind you 1) things could be worse and 2) human creativity truly knows no limits.

Cheers,

1. “Where are all the young, white literary men?” essay writers, take note.