Not quite fact, but not quite fiction either.

Be forewarned that as I write this I'm operating on a bunch of cold and flu meds while in the throes of a mad fever and a handful full of other unpleasant bodily malfunctions, so, apologies if my thought patterns seem a bit out of order. Thing is, I had this idea for a blog post and if I don't get it out now, I'll keep putting it off until a later date. And I know that making hilariously original jokes about procrastination is how all Uni students fill in about 86% of their spare time, but yeah, I need to get this done. 

Here goes...

Recently I spent a couple of days reading The Great Gatsby again, a book that everybody in the world has read and everybody in the world worth knowing enjoys. Well maybe that's not quite accurate, but it seemed like a cool statement nonetheless.

Anyway, I refuse to drone on about the book's themes of romance and nostalgia and personal identity and all that because, by this point, what can be said about Gatsby that hasn't been said already? I suppose you could say that the scene where Nick and Daisy are chased down a canal in a speedboat by an Apache gunship is poorly written, but the statement wouldn't have much credibility. When criticising literature it's best to make comments that are actually true of the book. And that scene was awesome.

What I do want to talk about in this post though is the book's geographical and historical setting; Upper-class America in the 1920s. 'The Jazz Age,' as Fitzgerald himself put it. Among the myriad accolades heaped upon this book, one thing Fitzgerald is often credited for is crafting an incredibly accurate portrait of the lifestyles of the wealthy at that time and place in history. Just as John Kennedy Toole is credited with painting the most accurate literary portrait of New Orleans in A Confederacy of Dunces, which is kind of a shame, seeing as that portrait is nestled in the pages of the most infuriatingly bad book I've ever forced myself to finish reading.

But while both authors have written narratives that are fictitious (more or less), the setting of both books and the idiosyncrasies of the characters who inhabit those settings both ring very true to life. Which got me thinking that sometimes, if written well enough, a work of narrative fiction could be more accurate in portraying society and reality than a traditional piece of news journalism. When an article demands a lead of 25 - 30 words there's no room for those little details that are often so prevalent in fiction and, as I keep discovering, literary journalism.

That's it.

But finally, just because I'm feeling sentimental:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past