Re-reading "The Great Gatsby"

In the latest edition of the Double Take series, I discover how wrong I was about F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz-age novel.

If only I had read The Great Gatsby as a child!

This is what I thought, after re-reading Fitzgerald’s classic, when I recalled what Alberto Manguel wrote about his relationship with Alice (of the Wonderland adventures). He first tumbled down the rabbit hole as a child, which meant that when he re-read her tales later in life, he could resist the imposition of other people’s interpretations. None of them, he writes, “have become, in any deep sense, my own”:

“The readings of others influence, of course, my personal reading, offer new points of view or colour certain passages, but mostly they are like the comments of the Gnat who keeps naggingly whispering in Alice’s ear, ‘You might make a joke on that.’”
(Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Alberto Manguel)

Although I was a prolific reader as a child, my literary aspirations remained latent until my late teens — there was no Gatsby for me until I turned twenty. By then, I’d read more pages of commentary on The Great Gatsby than there are pages in …