I’ve been re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the last few nights, prepping for the release of the film version starring Leonardo DiCaprio (coming out May 10). It’s my third time through the novel and each time, I like it more.
Look, I’m obviously a writer. I mess around with language every day, and I know how to string nouns and verbs together with a certain efficiency. But I’m astounded at the ability of writers like Fitzgerald: He and I use the very same words and follow the same rules of grammar, and yet his work is something outside my abilities on even my best day. For me, reading Fitzgerald’s stuff is a little like playing a round of golf with Tiger Woods. You just have to marvel.
Take this snippet, when our narrator renews acquaintances with his relation Daisy, Gatsby’s love interest:
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
The whole book is like that. How can someone write like that for 200 pages?
I’m not the only Gatsby fan, of course. Hollywood’s been repeatedly charmed by Fitzgerald’s classic tale, shoehorning it onto the big screen several times. The first was released in 1926, the year after the book was published. Fitzgerald allegedly received $13,000 for the film rights, but he wasn’t pleased with the final results. “We saw ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the movies,” Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, wrote to their daughter. “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.”
They were one of the first moviegoers to give voice to a now time-worn cliché: “The book is better.”
In an age in which our entertainments seem to cater to our every whim—our schedules, our sensibilities, our ever-dwindling attention spans—the old-fashioned book is still the most personal and malleable of them all. We’re free to picture the characters exactly as we’d like. We embrace what’s most compelling and skim the boring parts. Books offer a sense of intimacy with story that movies—in spite of all the sight and sound and special effects they bring to the table—just can’t match.
I appreciated The Chronicles of Narnia movies, for instance, but none of them have the charm of the original C.S. Lewis stories. I’ve seen a couple of BBC versions of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, but it’d be impossible to bring the fullness of the book—with all of its pathos and humor and tragedy and languid beauty—to any screen. The Harry Potter movies have earned critical praise and a boatload of money, but none of the films are probably as beloved to fans as the original novels.
But is that always true? I thought The Lord of the Rings movies were far more stirring than the books: One can only swim through so many poems written in elvish before one’s attention begins to wander.
And yet, as much as I loved the movies, it was reading the books in junior high that gave me nightmares of Ringwraiths skulking around in my bedroom.
I don’t think that one form of storytelling is necessarily “better” than another. But I do think they engage different parts of our brains. Movies are more immediate and visceral. The sights and sounds impact us more, and it can make even familiar moments in the books come to life in a way that we never imagined. I expect part of the popularity of The Bible miniseries was in helping audiences see a very familiar book in a new, more tangible way: the dirt of Jerusalem, the blood on the battlefields.
But the story itself, I think, sinks deeper roots when we read. The feel of the language drills into our psyches. They become a part of us, I think, in ways that movies—or at least most movies—can’t. I’ve watched some hard movies with difficult messages. But none of them have challenged me in the same way that, say, Heart of Darkness or All Quiet on the Western Front did. Those stories stuck with me, and still linger today.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the new Great Gatsby movie looks like. Perhaps it’ll be a good movie. Maybe even great.
But I’m pretty sure it won’t be as good as the book. Not for me, anyway.
[Note: Focus on the Family offers book reviews at thrivingfamily.com. You can find them here.]
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