Another really good Southern writer is Fred Chappell. A very good teller of tales. Also Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain.”

Just started “The Fellowship of The Ring.” Actually I got to thinking about it after reading DebD’s Tom Bombadil story. I read them all many years ago but I already appreciate the story much more now than then.

Sorry it seems I have wandered off on a tangent. Sorry. It’s just the English major in me.

I think here it is like reading some of the more puzzling Old Testament stories… and that is what I’d suggest. The narrator is a character in the story and doesn’t hold himself above reproach: he has feelings; he acts; he does make judgments… and sometimes capriciously. But in the end, he is faithful or loyal. There is something that keeps him assenting to Gatsby even at the end that I haven’t answered. And there is a telling in this story that captures much of what we’ve come to think of whenever we look on the Jazz Age. You can almost hear the wonder of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” winding up, or Hoagy Carmichael’s settling of the band in “Stardust” – in the better versions.

I am a subscriber to Jasper Fforde’s premise of the author as agency for an interaction between the reader and the characters in the book. And there is a wistful longing Fitzgerald captures, a nostalgia for “might have been” youth and an age of innocence that is undercut at every turn. And it isn’t so much the lack of good… but also the lack of outright evil.. that makes it remarkable. It is an evil that is particularly American in its comfort, its independence, and its shimmering resplendence… beneath which there is… what? So I guess I look at the whole as an unravelling of sorts.

But I fully understand your comments and hesitations. Maybe it’s why I’ve waited 50 years to take a crack at it. And maybe for you it would be like watching Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and just wanting to do what you can’t… to grab her (NOT like Mrs. Danvers!), and tell her to just “put a sock in it, suck it up, and stand up for yourself”… but you can’t.

I find that for clarity’s sake I need to sprinkle my Orthodox readings liberally with non-Orthodox stuff. And to make it more difficult, I am a very picky reader.

I have never read Fitzgerald mainly because I have heard that his characters aren’t altogether likable (as you said).