By Margaret Connor ’23
Copy Editor
On Jan. 1, 2021, all copyrighted works published in 1925 entered the public domain in the United States. Among these were Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s “In Our Time” and the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” A crop of “Gatsby” adaptations have since sprung up, including more lighthearted versions like the parody novel, “The Great Gatsby: But Nick has Scoliosis,” and an adult coloring book. The rendition garnering the most buzz, however, came from Michael Farris Smith, recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award for Fiction. Smith’s prequel, “Nick,” focuses on the eponymous Nick Carraway’s life before meeting eccentric millionaire Jay Gatsby, expanding on Nick’s childhood and time in the army. Unfortunately, vitiated by a lackluster narrative voice and a trite plot, “Nick” not only fails to live up to its predecessor, but fails to justify its own existence.
Smith is not the first author to pen a prequel or sequel to a beloved classic. Readers may recognize Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked,” an exploration of the Wicked Witch of the West’s backstory, or Jon Clinch’s 2007 debut novel, “Finn,” about Huckleberry Finn’s father. Yet the work “Nick” owes the most to and draws the most from is Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” — and a canonical classic in its own right.
Rhys’ novel, set in the West Indies in the 1800s, examines the racial and sexual exploitation of Victorian literature and society through the backstory of Bertha Mason, the archetypal “madwoman in the attic.” Smith certainly aims to bring the same literary weight and theoretical genius to his “Gatsby” addendum. He accomplishes this partly through a slower, more subdued tone than the original, and partly through pastiching every white American author who wrote anything from 1910-1930.
In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker, Smith recounted his experiences living abroad and reading the works of the Lost Generation, a cohort of American writers and poets working in the wake of the First World War. Among the best-known authors of the Lost Generation are Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. Though Smith’s first reading of “The Great Gatsby” had left him skeptical of its acclaim, upon revisiting the novel, he found himself drawn to their questions “about ‘home,’ and what it is — is it a feeling, is it a place? What is it exactly?”
With his greying beard and deep blue V-neck sweater, Smith explained over the choppy Zoom call how his life has mirrored that of wallflower, wanderer, witness-bearing storyteller Nick Carraway. Following his stint in France (where he fell in love with Paris and tried absinthe “for old time’s sake”), Smith returned to America feeling, in his words, “a little bit alien.” Now, more than a decade older, what struck him was Nick’s own belated realization of his 30th birthday, and his description of his thirties as “a decade of loneliness.” “It absolutely grabbed hold of me in a way I was never expecting,” Smith confessed.
Smith went on to explain that he and his agent set aside the book for five years before it could be published without infringing upon Fitzgerald’s copyright. During this period, Smith worked on other novels, growing as an author. By the time he returned to the manuscript, he was able to revise “Nick” into a “better novel … than it would have been if it was published four or five years [prior].”
Unfortunately, “Nick” has not the vinous aura of maturity-won wisdom, but the stale, overworked stench of a midlife crisis crossed with bad Hemingway.
The novel begins with Nick’s service as a soldier in the First World War, alternating between his harrowing experiences in the trenches of the French countryside and his brief moments of reprieve. During his time on leave, he falls into a tumultuous affair with Ella, a young woman who sells picture frames on the streets of Paris. Despite the language barrier, they quickly become emotionally inextricable and physically intimate.
Later, Nick discovers Ella had an abortion during his absence and, distraught, returns to the front, where he volunteers for the most dangerous assignment — descending into tunnels beneath the battlefield to listen for the enemy’s movements. During his long periods of reminiscence, we learn bits about Nick’s childhood. We find out about his mother’s depression and his father’s words of wisdom, including Smith’s rendition of the famous “Gatsby” line, “all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Nick returns to Paris for a final time, but cannot find Ella. Scarred by the war and feeling utterly alone, he returns to America, where Prohibition is on the horizon. Unable to return to his hometown and face his parents, he travels to New Orleans.
It’s at this point the novel descends into pure nonsense. The first half of “Nick” is marred by god-awful prose, reading like a cross between a debut novel written fresh out of an MFA program (probably released in brightly-colored hardcover with a white sans-serif title) and Hemingway’s black sheep fifth novel, “Across the River and Into the Trees.” Smith’s clumsy arrangements of run-on sentences and fragmented phrases bog down the novel from the first paragraph — not that stronger prose could breathe life into the tired, clichéd plot.
The second half sees a major improvement in the language at the expense of the actual narrative content. In New Orleans, Nick becomes embroiled in the scheming of Judah, another WWI veteran, and his estranged ex-wife, Colette, who has become a brothel madam following her ex-husband’s apparent death. The third-person narration hovers over their shoulders, robbing “Nick” of its greatest strength: Nick Carraway. Nick’s emotional acuity and understated reactions make for a compelling narrator — even in the hands of Smith — but a very boring ensemble character. The glacial pace does not let up; many chapters feel like retreads of previous sections.
There are moments when Smith’s prose and imagination shine in tandem, capturing for a brief chapter the sharp, evocative voice of Fitzgerald or Hemingway. One scene deserving mention is the brothel fire Nick witnesses in New Orleans. Between the screams and the smoke, he flashes back to the battlefield, ranting to no one in particular, “I can’t help you. I can’t help you. I can’t help.”
Smith’s incarnation of Nick Carraway is strongest playing the same role he served in “The Great Gatsby” — witness and storyteller. The most memorable vignette in “Nick” is arguably the novel’s most explicitly homoerotic scene: Nick’s regiment launches a vicious attack on the Germans, leaving behind only two of the enemy’s soldiers. Disoriented and shell-shocked, the men stumble towards the American side, holding hands and embracing, blind to the overwhelming danger, as the American soldiers jeer, “Got two lollipops dancing around like schoolgirls,” and “You ain’t kissed yet!” Nick, hypnotized by the scene, only watches.
“The Great Gatsby” left behind open questions of sexuality and homoeroticism, and while “Nick” initially suggests a hardline heterosexual interpretation of Carraway, his bond with Judah evolves into something suggestive. Smith draws parallels between Nick’s affair with Ella and his loyalty to his fellow veteran, as he makes futile promises to both and tries his best to fix each one. Judah’s ex-wife even debates whether the men’s closeness comes from their shared war-trauma, or from something more intimate: “Maybe that is all there is between him and Judah. Maybe that’s why he is caring for him. Maybe they understand each other, she thought. But she could not help wondering if there was more to it.”
I wish there were more to it. I wish there were more to “Nick.” But it’s already 300 pages, and nothing’s happened.