… The Great Gatsby seems inescapable lately, which is a good thing, because it’s hard to think of a more beautifully written novel.

With a new film adaptation in the works, people are already blogging skeptically about the capacity of any director to translate the depth of that novel to the flatness of the screen.  Look here, and here, and elsewhere.

In his remarks about the novel and upcoming film, New York Times blogger Ross Douthat cites the Gatsby paragraphs below as the sort of excitingly visual material a smart filmmaker should focus on in any adaption of the work.   Let’s look at the paragraphs, though, in terms of their prose style.  (My comments about what Fitzgerald’s doing with his prose appear in blue, in brackets.)

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By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, [The present tense gives the passage a sense of immediacy, gives us the drama of the party as it unfolds. The speaker here, Nick Carraway, is, as his name hints, carried away, excited, anticipating, taking each sound, object, and person in with superficial excitement, and then moving on to the next sound, object, person.  All of the party guests, we assume, are doing this — all are caught up in the madly shifting celebratory moments.] no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. [Note the poetic repetition of O sounds throughout this sentence: o’clock, orchestra, no, whole, oboes, trombones, saxophones, viols, cornets, piccolos, low… It creates a kind of bass tone, making us feel as though the ‘ensemble’ of this passage is tuning up in preparation for high points; or, if you like, that the ‘engine’ of the passage is revving.] The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. [Notice how the writer gives equal status to human beings and objects in this sentence. Swimmers, cars, halls, salons, verandas, hair, shawls — tossing animate and non-animate things together in this way does more than deepen the already-established sense of frenetic, one-thing-after-another, excitement; it implicitly suggests the superficiality of the party-goers, reducing them to objects. Pay attention as well to the insistent use of the word “and.” It’s everywhere in these paragraphs – the simple monosyllabic conjunction allows the writer to fling phrases into a crazy salad, to convey the mad chaotic feel of the scene.  Yet there’s also an undeniably biblical cadence to the repeated invocation of and.] The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names. [There’s another subtle thing going on in this paragraph: The last swimmers, dreams of Castile, and now permeate and floating… In subtle opposition to the hyper-modern, radically present accounting of the event, there’s a strange, elegiac, dreamy, retro something pressing itself on the reader. This language is odd.  It’s off somehow, coming from another, deeper world.  Think of phases like the nymphs are departed from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; they have the same odd mix of modernity and antiquity, routine and mythic.  Fitzgerald’s giving his story a universal, timeless feel, rather in the way Joyce’s Ulysses gets that feel from his direct use of myth. Although in the Gatsby passage the mythic aspect is oblique, the reader, I think, gradually registers this heightening corona around the earthbound narrative facts, so that when she arrives at the novel’s famous last paragraphs, with their romantic, elevated language, she’s prepared for them.]

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. [See how Fitzgerald – what to call it? – cosmologizes his scene? How he always frames it in terms vastly greater than the scene itself? The earth and the sun with their dance; and then the partygoers also heavenly bodies, moving, dissolving, undergoing sea-changes… Add the Biblical echoes in words like prodigality and wanderers, and all of it lends that coronal atmosphere of vastly greater implication to the proceedings.  See how the paragraph begins and ends with light?   As the natural light of the world wanes, the unnatural – and ominously unstable – light of human activity intensifies.]

Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.  [varies his rhythm obligingly for her — the implicit sexuality of the scene, that low bass of excitement at the beginning of these paragraphs, is now made explicit.]