Gatsby by Jane Crowther; The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler – Jay's eternal hold

The Guardian

31-03-2025

It might seem unfathomable to us now, but F Scott Fitzgerald's third novel was something of a let-down when it was published 100 years ago; his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned – there had also been a novella, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz, and short stories including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – had been more commercially successful and found greater favour with critics. Fitzgerald's tale of obscure origins, extreme wealth and obsessional romantic desire appeared too unlikely, too contrived and, perhaps, too uncomfortable a reminder of class and financial inequality and its consequent social schisms to be recognised for what it was: a masterly exploration of delusion, self-delusion, myth-making and complicity.
Fitzgerald himself died 15 years after its publication believing it to have been a worldly failure and unconsoled by any hint of its future cultural ubiquity. But literature, as we know, is studded with these anomalies, burials and rebirths and now, in an age of recycling and rebooting, it seems perfectly natural, if ironic, for The Great Gatsby to spawn a number of tribute acts.
Nonetheless, it's striking that Jane Crowther's Gatsby and Claire Anderson-Wheeler's The Gatsby Gambit are debut novels, suggesting that the original is an artefact that feels fundamentally available, not forbiddingly off-limits; that both writer and reader might feel they have absorbed enough of Gatsby's internal workings as well as its superficial detail to find variation productive and interesting. (This is, of course, a generous interpretation; familiarity is also commercially attractive.)
Crowther's approach is both straightforward and, in execution, intricate. She brings Gatsby to the very recent past, just pre-pandemic, and messes with gender; Gatsby becomes a female influencer, her apparently limitless funds provided not by bootlegging but invisible arrangements with beauty brands and real estate companies. Her love object is not Daisy but Danny Buchanan, the decent enough but none-too-deep husband of T, a far more savvy and implacable operator. Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald's implicated insider-outsider, is Nic, a young woman seeking to make her name not on the money markets but in the more cut-throat world of lifestyle journalism.
These narrative switches take up a fair amount of energy to manifest, as Jay herself might describe it in one of her Instagram posts, and keeping track of how Crowther maps old on to new can eclipse some of her more interesting choices: that Tom's lover Myrtle, for example, becomes Miguel, an undocumented worker from the Dominican Republic with an interest in baseball and Warcraft, and a passing acquaintance with 'some guys out in Queens' who sell drugs at Gatsby's parties. For Nic, who has swallowed whole her new friend's bone-broth-and-vitamins persona, this is information to be brushed under the carpet, as is the suspicion that camera surveillance is a key part of those gatherings, and of Gatsby's modus operandi. But despite the novel sometimes over-signalling its ingenuity in reimagining the cultural landscape, Crowther still does well to portray its central figure as a tragic over-reacher, impelled by what she imagines to be love to enter into a social stratum in which preservation of the status quo is prized above all else.
The Gatsby Gambit is a different affair altogether; a thoroughly enjoyable mystery story with all the tropes and pleasures of a golden age detective story. Our sleuth is Jay Gatsby's invented little sister Greta, who arrives for a summer at his West Egg home poised on the brink of adulthood and chafing at her much-loved brother's overprotectiveness. When Tom Buchanan is found dead – apparently by his own hand, in the face of spiralling debts – on Gatsby's boat, Greta's quiet persistence and powers of observation mean that she must exonerate Gatsby himself, who rapidly becomes the chief suspect. Well-written and pacy, inflected by the original characters and setting but otherwise unconstrained by them, The Gatsby Gambit romps along in rather happier vein than Fitzgerald might have recognised.
As for the novel celebrating its centenary, the literary wheel keeps turning: Sarah Wynn-Williams's exposé of the Zuckerberg empire takes its title, Careless People, directly from Fitzgerald; switching on Radio 4 this week, I heard Alexei Sayle deliver the novel's final line – 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past' – to bathetic comic effect. That past does indeed remain another country, but one we love to visit.
Gatsby by Jane Crowther is published by the Borough Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler is published by Renegade (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply