The Great Landzman

KIRKUS REVIEWS: “Jewusiak reimagines an American classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald... Nick Carramel is an anti-Semite. Delsey and Jillian deconstruct the metaphors of the story as they introduce them. James Landzman, a former soldier and circus acrobat who performed under the moniker “The Great Gatsby,” is even more inscrutable and laden with symbolism than Fitzgerald’s creation. These bizarro versions of Nick Carraway and company spend the book discussing modernist literature, capitalism, and the American dream … Some segments of the book… are epistolary findings from the files of the characters, included by the narrator in an attempt to reach the (unreachable) truth of Landzman’s true nature. Cloaked in Lemony Snicket–esque layers of metafiction, Jewusiak, the narrator, Landzman, Carramel, Fitzgerald, and Jay Gatsby himself begin to merge into one tangled archetype of American power, deception, authorship, and authority. Jewusiak has an indisputable talent for language, invoking Fitzgerald as he spins his own rambling poetry: ‘The big spenders, the high rollers, the small town boosters chomping down on the big sloppy wet cigars, gathered like a great host from the provinces, the backwaters and boondocks to get plastered on the distilled spirits of exhilaration.’…”