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…