No one in American culture personifies boom times quite like Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional scion of West Egg. When times are good, we all imagine ourselves crashing one of Gatsby's legendary parties, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous as we celebrate our ascent out of the hoi polloi and into the financial elite.
The attitude may have been best captured by the rapper Sean "Puff Daddy" "Puffy" "P. Diddy" "Diddy" Combs, who rose from hustling in the streets to become a multimillionaire media and fashion mogul. In recent years, Combs has taken to throwing himself Gatsbyesque society parties in the posh Hamptons, on New York's Long Island. An interviewer once asked the rap star whether he had ever read Fitzgerald's classic novel. "Have I read the Great Gatsby?" Puffy responded. "I am the Great Gatsby!"
But all it takes is one great crash to take us from the glories of The Great Gatsby to the miseries of the Great Depression. We learned that the hard way in 1929. The fictional Jay Gatsby ceased to be an icon and became a cruel joke. The real F. Scott Fitzgerald tumbled into a pit of depression and alcoholism. The whole country hit the skids.
In 2008, we hit a crash of our own. Hopefully the economic meltdown of the present won't, in fact, end up turning into the Great Depression 2.0. But maybe, even so, we'll find that we're moving out of another age of Gatsby. Maybe the iconic literature of our own time will prove to be less Fitzgerald and more mindless escapism the vampire romances of Twilight or the conspiracy-theory page-turners of Dan Brown. Or maybe we're just waiting for our own version of John Steinbeck to arrive as the chronicler of new hard times. We might prefer to have Gatsby (and Puffy) make a comeback, though.
The attitude may have been best captured by the rapper Sean "Puff Daddy" "Puffy" "P. Diddy" "Diddy" Combs, who rose from hustling in the streets to become a multimillionaire media and fashion mogul. In recent years, Combs has taken to throwing himself Gatsbyesque society parties in the posh Hamptons, on New York's Long Island. An interviewer once asked the rap star whether he had ever read Fitzgerald's classic novel. "Have I read the Great Gatsby?" Puffy responded. "I am the Great Gatsby!"
But all it takes is one great crash to take us from the glories of The Great Gatsby to the miseries of the Great Depression. We learned that the hard way in 1929. The fictional Jay Gatsby ceased to be an icon and became a cruel joke. The real F. Scott Fitzgerald tumbled into a pit of depression and alcoholism. The whole country hit the skids.
In 2008, we hit a crash of our own. Hopefully the economic meltdown of the present won't, in fact, end up turning into the Great Depression 2.0. But maybe, even so, we'll find that we're moving out of another age of Gatsby. Maybe the iconic literature of our own time will prove to be less Fitzgerald and more mindless escapism the vampire romances of Twilight or the conspiracy-theory page-turners of Dan Brown. Or maybe we're just waiting for our own version of John Steinbeck to arrive as the chronicler of new hard times. We might prefer to have Gatsby (and Puffy) make a comeback, though.