Impossible to Imagine

Toward the end of his life, in a fit of self-doubt and fears of being a “has-been,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Max Perkins, to ask if his Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, would be forgotten in the years to come. From our vantage, his worries seem almost impossible to imagine: Gatsby is one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century—it is on high school syllabi, has been remade into movies, is invoked by columnists and celebrities, and an industry of criticism has been built around it. Rereading the novel in conjunction with a new annotated edition released by Library of America, Mark Chiusano asks if it is possible to imagine any novel written in our own age commanding such a reputation: “Could someone capture today’s post-wars, post-Covid attitude so succinctly, or even really coin this age’s name? What would the single word be, and then how would that word catch on?” Perhaps the difficulty also rests in how Gatsby anticipated the years that followed—not the Depression, of course, but the excesses of our current age in which the wealthy have access to nearly every luxury imaginable and the poor can barely find a way to scrape by. “I’m not sure we even have the tools anymore for a writer like Fitzgerald to chronicle this era, let alone narrate it,” Chiusano concludes. Read “Will There Ever Be Another “Great Gatsby”?”

Blood and Blues

Sinners is the first film Ryan Coogler has written as well as directed. He has previously directed and written adaptations and franchise fare, using familiar stories and properties to explore police brutality, masculinity, and nationalism. But even if Sinners marks a departure from his past movies, it shares with them a central concern: that of legacy. A vampire flick set in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s, Sinners, much like Black Panther and Creed, is primarily interested in the question of what is passed from the dead to the living and how people bear and harness that heritage for future generations. Reviewing the film for The Nation, Stephen Kearse observes that this is what has always made Coogler’s blockbusters work. There is always more than meets the eye: With Sinners, we get “a period drama and a postmodern fantasy, a pulpy vampire tale and a grounded meditation on the horrors of Jim Crow, an ode to Sunday service and the nights of revelry that precede it”—and each invested in asking what about this history has created our present age. Read “The Bloody Blues of “Sinners””