skygiants | (no subject)

Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful is a slightly magical The Great Gatsby AU from the POV of Vietnamese adoptee Jordan Baker, and as I started to read it, I did very much spend the first several chapters thinking "maybe I should stop and reread The Great Gatsby first before coming back?"

...and part of me does regret a little that I did not do that, because I do think there are moments in the book that would have worked better for me, or had more layers to them, if I could remember the original well enough to determine exactly which choices and divergences Vo was making. On the other hand, the real question is, does the book work as a book itself or just as a fun exercise in intertextuality? And by like three-quarters of the way in I was invested enough in Vo's particular Jordan Baker and her own unique internal life and uneasy placement within the society through which she moves that I no longer felt a constant burning desire to go find the closest copy of The Great Gatsby for cross-reference, so I would say ... probably yes? Eventually, mostly?

Like, the parts of the book that are unique to this book -- especially the parts that lean into Jordan's paper-craft magic, flat figures and doppelgangers -- are really good; I read this book back in July or so and there are a couple scenes that are still haunting me. And I understand why this story interwoven around the Gatsby story, it's relevant and thematic; I do think possibly the balance was a little off? Like, this book sort of feels like ivy growing around the tree that's the Fitzgerald original ... the ivy is beautiful and changes the aspect dramatically but the tree is generally still the central structural thing and I think there's enough here that it didn't have to be, this could have been a ... new tree? The metaphor is possibly getting away from me a little.

Anyway, I did enjoy it very much and as always Vo's prose is gorgeous, her characters interestingly edged and her way with a central image simply superb. I admit -- coming back to Gatsby -- the thing that surprised me the most was the relatively central and sympathetic positioning of Nick and the Nick/Jordan romance, because tbh my vague memory from reading The Great Gatsby was that both Nick and Jordan were too afflicted with cynical observer syndrome to be particularly invested in each other at all as anything other than a brunch-date-of-convenience ... this was probably the biggest thing I wanted to cross-reference against the original just because I cannot at all tell if this is a true memory of The Great Gatsby (which I last read in the year 2002 or thereabouts) or simply many years of fandom osmosis.

That said, I did really love the way that particular thread concluded -- an incredible feat of full-book recontextualization that more or less justified the project of The Chosen and the Beautiful for me in and of itself.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

shadaras

It's such a neat book!

Reading it with a similarly long-ago memory of Great Gatsby (to the point where I mostly just remembered specific images and the overal plotline as related to Gatsby himself) was very fun, because it definitely had the feeling of like... when I read fanfic for a canon I once knew well, or a canon I know primarily through osmosis, and I see the bones of it but I'm mostly here for the ride and the new stuff? But not in a bad way, because I trusted Vo to give me every element of the plot that mattered, so even when I didn't know the canon being reflected it was still lovely to read.

I liked Jordan, generally, in her defiance and her terror of being caught out as not-quite-belonging anywhere. I also would've loved more of the magic, and the paper-craft, and the other new worldbuilding that turned it into urban fantasy! The stuff about demons and how it interacted with prohibition was really cool!

And, yes, that ending was fantastic.

From:

sovay

Like, this book sort of feels like ivy growing around the tree that's the Fitzgerald original ... the ivy is beautiful and changes the aspect dramatically but the tree is generally still the central structural thing and I think there's enough here that it didn't have to be, this could have been a ... new tree? The metaphor is possibly getting away from me a little.

If you have not read Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus (2020), I believe it is germane to this discussion: it's a YA novel that puts a new (Chinese-Korean-American) tree in place of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but you can still see the shape the ivy grew around.

From:

musesfool

Oh, neat. I hadn't heard of this book, but I am definitely adding it to my to-read list because I have great fondness for Gatsby as a novel.

From:

whimsyful

this book sort of feels like ivy growing around the tree that's the Fitzgerald original ... the ivy is beautiful and changes the aspect dramatically but the tree is generally still the central structural thing and I think there's enough here that it didn't have to be, this could have been a ... new tree? The metaphor is possibly getting away from me a little.

I think it's a good metaphor! It captures my feelings about the book pretty well--it's gorgeously written and a great retelling, but I wish it didn't stick so closely to the plot of the original Gatsby and branched out more into it's own thing instead.

From:

chestnut_pod

Well, seems like we are generally in agreement! Oh, for the sequel that will never come…

From:

likeadeuce

my vague memory from reading The Great Gatsby was that both Nick and Jordan were too afflicted with cynical observer syndrome to be particularly invested in each other at all as anything other than a brunch-date-of-convenience ...

This is definitely my memory of it as well, and I've read the book several times and care a lot about both Nick and Jordan so I think you're probably right. . .That said, I am not surprised that a Jordan POV retelling would choose to develop that relationship.

I've had this one on hold for a while, and as a bit of a Gatsby nerd, I am looking forward to it.

From:

starlady

Ugh, I loved it. Except that making all three of them queer made me care about everyone again and of course it's a tragedy and no one is particularly happy by the end--except perhaps Jordan, maybe, in the future.

I feel like the book kind of rejustifies the existence of the original? I think I agree with you about the ivy and tree thing, but the ivy makes the tree beautiful again. In any case this is a standard for retellings that will be hard to beat.

From:

kore

I have this and keep meaning to read it! My memory, ugh.

At the end of the book with that famous "I met another bad driver" conversation, Nick says he's angry, and "half in love with her," and tremendously sorry. She pins him with "I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person" which is how he's presenting himself throughout the whole book. They are both cynical, or they like to think they're cynical, but they both get entangled and wind up damaging each other, is how I see it. It's interesting because that links him with his judgment of Tom and Daisy as "careless people" who leave others to clean up the mess, and he clearly sees himself as one of the people left behind in the wreckage. But the text keeps suggesting he's more culpable than that (which I think is deliberate on Fitzgerald's part: he was a huge fan of Joseph Conrad).

From:

brainwane

This was my first Nghi Vo book, and I had a pretty clear memory of The Great Gatsby since I reread it probably every 5-10 years. I'm glad I read it but it didn't thrill me. First-person protagonists who are really prickly and sometimes lie to friends/peers or otherwise act like jerks (no matter their gender) are not pleasurable for me to read. And -- this is a small thing perhaps -- in that big confrontation among Jay and Nick and Daisy, in The Great Gatsby, Jordan says, "We're all white here," and I was looking forward to seeing how this Jordan would say that specific line in a way that Nghi Vo could plausibly justify, but instead, she changed the line.

The, like, 5% of your DW subscribers who are interested in Gatsby retellings but are ok with them being neither from a non-male character's point of view nor queer might be interested in Jake, Reinvented by YA author Gordon Korman, who sets the story in a modern high school. I liked it.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, a lot of what I remember of Great Gatsby is images that have become, like, memetic to the culture itself? The kind of thing that gets parodied enough around the internet that it reinforces the memory -- the green light, the beautiful shirts, the big eyes in the sky -- but very little of the actual dialogue and plot detail. But that stuff I was a bit frustrated by not remembering as well as I wanted to (a me problem, not a book problem), whereas everything that was new delighted me and I also would have loved more of it!

From:

skygiants

I have neither read nor heard of it but that's a beautiful cover and an intriguing description, thank you for the rec!

From:

skygiants

After reading Gatsby in ninth grade I went on a full Fitzgerald tear and read pretty much all of his catalog plus some Zelda bios, and I truly do wish I remembered any of it now. I hope you enjoy this one if you read it!

From:

skygiants

Right, and like, it's a beautiful retelling and recontextualization, and I have nothing against a beautiful retelling and recontextualization, it's just all the new stuff was so good that I kept looking wistfully after it when we dove back into the Gatsby plot like

nghi vo distracted boyfriend

Edited Date: 2021-09-19 11:16 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

YEAH, I love your idea of using this as a launchpad for another 400 pages of story -- I'm also very curious to see what her next full-length novel will look like, too, which is (I think? if I remember the deal announcement correctly?) set in broadly the same time period/maybe the same world? but not based off an existing novel the way this one is.

From:

skygiants

As a true Gatsby aficionado, I hope you enjoy it! I'm still occasionally fighting the urge to pull out a copy of Gatsby and do a real side-by-side comparison.

From:

skygiants

One hopes Jordan in the future (and I do also hope good things for Nick tbh, [spoilers] I feel should not preclude him from this and in fact make me more intrigued by and protective of him than I was previously] but yeah -- as it stands, very much a tragedy. But you are very right, as Gatsby enters the public domain and a slew of retellings become more-or-less inevitable, this one does set the bar extremely high!

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I have always read Nick as culpable to an extent in his very assumption of distance -- the narrator who gets entangled to a greater degree than he intends or will acknowledge to himself, whose hands are dirty precisely because he thinks them so clean. But this is all leftover from nearly twenty years ago and I read a lot of things very differently now than I did then, so I am quite curious what I would make of him now!

From:

skygiants

It's very different from her novellas, both of which I loved very much -- this one wasn't an unmitigated pleasure for me in the same way, but I admired it as a project and found several elements extremely haunting. I personally liked Jordan's prickliness, but I do tend to like prickly protagonists!

See, things like remembering which bits of dialogue were changed and which were verbatim are part of the reason that I kept wanting to go back and check! I couldn't even remember if that scene overall had been in the original or was added, though you'd think it would have stuck in my memory.

From:

chestnut_pod

I would fully accept a TCATB Cinematic Universe.

From:

paperback

I actually just finished this last week! I...promised myself I would complete ONE of the books I was already reading before rereading Hexwood, haha.

I'm in the boat of having not read Gatsby since high school, so I did also have the "maybe I should be rereading that alongside or before continuing this?" and ultimately did not. I do think it stands on its own as a story of an alternate world and as a work with absolutely gorgeous prose. But I also think that it could have pushed its themes of alienation, non-belonging, and illusion further if it was less tied to tracking the story of Gatsby. I know those are all themes that are present in the original work, and Vo is recontextualizing them by focusing on her version of Jordan, but it seems that it could have felt deeper if she'd let herself go into more original territory. Those themes actually hit hardest in scenes like the one where she visits the Vietnamese troupe, not at Gatsby's parties.

I think the difference in how Nick is presented was an interesting and deliberate contrast. Nick sees himself as that jaded and worldly, but in fact his pretentions at Midwestern honesty while actually engaging with everything he might judge puts him halfway in between in a way that makes him uniquely able to damage people in a different way than someone like Gatsby. He's the puppet of different modes of "American" values, each of which are damaging.

From:

lirazel

this could have been a ... new tree

I mean, I haven't read it yet, so I guess I can't say anything, but also: why is it not a new tree???? It just seems so weird to me that this story was written as GG fanfic instead of its own thing?

From:

skygiants

The scene where Jordan encounters the troupe member at Gatsby's house was maybe the first time that I stopped thinking 'wow I wish I had a copy of Gatsby open next to me to cross-reference' and was able to just settle in and appreciate the story that was being told as its own thing -- I loved that whole thread and definitely thought those scenes were some of the best in the book.

That's a really good point; Jordan's perception of Nick as semi-genuine, as a possibility for genuine emotional engagement that's ultimately proven to be moderately (though not entirely) illusory, does make for a really fascinating foil to Nick's recounting of the story. It's not the obvious interpretation for this kind of retelling but that does make it a more interesting one!

From:

skygiants

I mean, I get it! Plot is hard! It's certainly always easier for me to take the building blocks of a plot that already exists and construct around it rather than having to figure out a whole novel-length story from scratch, so I'm absolutely not in a position to complain about anyone else doing it.