SBD: Sex, Gatsby, and overreaching

You might not think Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have much in common, other than the fact both focus on the lives of the shallow, nouveau riche, but for Beth’s Smart Bitches Day (which I have ignored these last several weeks for lack of anything to say), I can do better than that.

But first, you’re probably wondering what happened to me yesterday. Or not. Maybe I shouldn’t assume your lives depend on me posting at least once a day, hmm? Anyway, let me quickly say WE’RE BOTH FINE. It’s good for hospital morale if the employees see their physicians (and soon to be chief-of-staff, I might add haughtily) use the emergency facilities. It fills them with confidence. And besides, the nearest larger hospital is another seventy miles south, not that that had anything to do with our choice of hospitals. Nope, nothing at all. In any case, I don’t have pneumonia and Karen didn’t have a heart attack so I guess we’re both a couple of hypochondriacs.

Am I boring you yet? Here. Check out Renee’s Christmas card to me. One question, Renee: is that mistletoe hanging over your girlfriends, and if so, may I please have a raincheck?

Onward to more serious Smart Bitchery . . .

I should begin by insuring myself against Beth’s oft-repeated (or at least, oft-thought) charge that I’m unclear on the SBD concept. Yes, I realize neither book is a romance. Not a typical romance, anyway, since neither ends with an HEA. Carrie loses Mr. Big in the end of Sex and the City (not that I have finished the execrable thing, but as I’ve written, Ms. Bushnell tells us the ending in her preface), and poor Gatsby loses everything by the end of his novel. But both novels are about love and desire and sex, and the main characters of each novel desperately want the same things romance protagonists want; and damn it, must every romance have an HEA? Yes, yes, we’ve covered that turf before, and I knuckled under to your collective wills. But I’m having a devil of a time slotting these two into any other genre.

What is Sex and the City — a comedy of manners? Bloody unfunny comedy, if you ask me. But you have to credit Bushnell’s boldness, or at least blink your eyes in wonder at her decision to write a novel without a single likable character. Really. Pick it up sometime. Here’s how Bushnell introduces Carrie (when, in Chapter Six, she finally gets around to something remotely resembling an introduction), arguably the book’s main character:

“I think I’m turning into a man,” said Carrie. She lit up her twentieth cigarette of the day and when the maître d’hôtel ran over and told her to put it out, she said, “Why, I wouldn’t dream of offending anyone.” Then she put the cigarette out on the carpet.

Is it even a novel? From Bushnell’s masturbatory intro, I gather Sex began as a column in the New York Observer. Indeed, it reads like a book cobbled from articles strung in loosely chronological order. Scads of character development (not to mention a bewildering ensemble of characters), zippo in the way of plot. The Carrie/Mr. Big “romance” tries to achieve the stature of plot arc, but it fizzles, drowned out by all the other glittery bits Bushnell crams into her pages.

I’ve called Sex an anti-romance. It’s an anti-novel, too, a work which does violence to the very idea of a coherent story. Ultimately, it’s nothing more than Bushnell’s attempt to cash in on the successful TV series her column inspired.

***

I reread Gatsby this last week, intending to make my son read it as a homeschooling assignment. Yes, he’s too young for it. You have to have been in love to appreciate Gatsby’s character; otherwise, he’s little more than a deluded, rich fool who says Old sport far too often to be likable, and his ultimate fall seems more comic than tragic.

Though it has been touted as the Great American Novel, Gatsby is far from perfect. The biggest problem is Daisy: she is so superficial, so empty, so utterly annoying, that Gatsby’s devotion makes him look, as I’ve said, delusional. I know that’s supposed to be the point. He has projected all of his dreams onto her, made her into something grand when in reality she’s little more than a cipher. But it does do some damage to him as a tragic hero, I think.

The other thing I noticed on this rereading was Fitzgerald’s lack of confidence. He begins and ends the novel with a few ponderous paragraphs, the sort you need to parse and masticate, the point of which (as far as I can tell) is to lay claim to the territory of Greatness. From the beginning:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, ” just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

It gets worse. A bit later,

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him [Gatsby], some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

Yawn. But, see, this is what I mean by overreaching. Tell your story, damn it; and if the story doesn’t make your point, rewrite it until it does. Don’t try to clobber us over the head with it in your closing remarks:

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

And that bit gets worse, too, as anyone who has read the book might remember. I think Fitzgerald makes his point and makes it well enough that he didn’t need to whip out the highlighter.

Of course, there are highlighters and there are highlighters. When you’re overreaching for significance, you can hardly improve upon Candace Bushnell’s introduction. Remember?

I suppose that’s why Sex and the City is such an unsentimental examination of relationships and mating habits. Although some people find its lack of sentiment and cruel humor disturbing, it’s probably only because the book contains some kind of universal truth.

At least she didn’t patronize us by explaining that ‘universal truth’ — oh, wait! My bad. She does!

And so, at last, the book has a real ending, in which Carrie and Mr. Big break up. It’s a bittersweet ending — not just the end of Carrie’s relationship with Mr. Big, but the end of her dream of finding the proverbial Mr. Big — a man who doesn’t really exist. If you read closely, you’ll discover that even Mr. Big himself points out that he is a fantasy in Carrie’s imagination, and that you can’t love a fantasy.

You can’t love a fantasy? Tell Jay Gatsby. Sure, you might self-destruct in the process, but it happens all the time.

So that’s all I have to say about overreaching. In a few words, DON’T DO IT. Have confidence in your story!

But I see now that I have wandered off into another interesting topic, too, thanks to the fact both books dwell on shattered dreams. I wonder: in romance novels, how often do dreams collide with reality? The trite story line is quite the opposite. At first, the hero appears to be gruff, brutish, and generally unappetizing, but as the heroine gets to know him, he merges with her Dream Hero. The dream is confirmed, not denied. But why not have a story in which the hero fails to match up to the heroine’s dream, and yet, owing to his other strengths — and mostly owing to the fact he’s real, and the dream is not — he wins her heart nonetheless?

Parse and masticate that, my dearies.

D.