Riffing on Gatsby

A few years ago, an Atlantic Monthly headline asked "Must Every New Coming-of-Age Novel Be 'the Next Catcher in the Rye'?" (Kelly). Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald might wonder if its author, Maura Kelly—who once collaborated with Jack Murnighan on a book called Much Ado About Loving: What Our Favorite Novels Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-So-Great Gatsbys and Love in the Time of Internet Personals (2012)—ought to do a follow-up centering upon The Great Gatsby. Just as each publishing season delivers at least one or two novels touted as "a female Catcher" or a "Catcher for the____Generation," so, too, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel has become an all-purpose marketing handle. In recent years, novels as different as Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) and Sara J. Benincasa's young-adult/sci-fi Great (2014) have been promoted as spins on the story of Jay Gatsby's relationship with Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and the American Dream. Recently on Tumblr an aspiring Champaign, Illinois, college senior described her entry for the online competition #pitchwars as a "race-bent, gender-bent YA The Great Gatsby" (Phenix).

Its title?

Green Lights.

Stephanie Powell Watts's No One is Coming to Save Us is the most prominent novel lately to receive this "green-light" treatment. As Jade Chang in the New York Times writes, the book is a "skillful riff on The Great Gatsby," a "Gatsby reboot" that pays careful homage to Fitzgerald's novel while recasting its concerns within a contemporary context (Chang). Over at National Public Radio, Ari Shapiro titles his interview with Watts "Fitzgerald Didn't Satisfy This Author, So She Wrote Her Own Gatsby-Inspired Novel." In it the author goes to great lengths to insist she is not rewriting Fitzgerald:

The kernel, the seed of the book is very much in the spirit of Gatsby: the idea that someone returns to a place that is home for him, or he's hoping is home for him, and he comes back and he is hoping to live out a fantasy life that he's dreamed about for some time. And so that kernel to me is what my book is about, or is at least a starting place for my book. But it goes in different directions from there.

(Shapiro)

Even so, she makes it clear No One is Coming to Save Us sets out to speak for certain voices underrepresented by Fitzgerald:

When you read Gatsby, or maybe even shortly afterwards, didn't you want to know about Daisy? I mean, she's so flighty and she seems so ridiculous, there has to be something in there that's making her make this tremendous move in her life. Or Myrtle [Wilson]—I mean, she's so much like Jay Gatsby, you know: She's such a striver; she's trying so hard to you know "better herself"; she's trying so hard to be in another class.

And so those kinds of questions made me think about, "Well, what about these women here?" I want to talk about the ones that are like my mother and like my grandmothers, who are striving and trying to figure out the world with not a whole lot of resources in all kinds of ways, but who want better for themselves and for their children. And so I'm really drawn to those characters that don't get their say.

(Shapiro)

Several elements of the novel do indeed evoke Gatsby, even though No One is Coming to Save Us is firmly planted in the red clay of the South (North Carolina specifically). The humidity reeks from the pages like the familiar summer haze of New York City in June 1922. The style also strives for Fitzgerald in its combination of rich words and careful phrasing:

One of the tricks of time is that your own ordinary life took on a sweetness in the retelling.

(210)

They didn't experience joy then, just the immediacy of the...