The Last Green Light

The Great Gatsby and the Last Green Light are twins. The same story told by different people at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. . The privileged Nick Carraway's point of view from Great Gatsby shifts in this book to Jon, a working man who met Jay Gatsby before his incredible wealth, the wealth he saw brought others power and permanence. Jon is employed by the dazzling and mercurial Gatsby and it is as though we, the reader, are more familiar with this viewpoint of an ordinary man, seeing gross waste, lies, assumed racial superiority and at the same time the seduction of such wealth and careless luxury which belies a fascination with the Beau Monde. Behind the shallow Jazz Age parties, champagne cocktails and elegant tailoring are the invisible men and women creating their boss's wealth through toil and dangerous undertakings. Nick Carraway's widowed Finnish cook from the original book gets a name and backstory and is seen dragging heavy baskets of crockery from Gatsby 's garden party to the house to earn enough to live, unseen by drunken, spoiled guests, The message in America is don't stand in the way of a rich man getting richer unless you want to get hurt- jump on board instead and try to get rich yourself, however immoral or illegal. This retelling weaves the same themes together but tells of the poverty and toil that underpinned the wealth and privilege.

I was both eager and hesitant to read this latest retelling of Fitzgerald’s classic novel. I’ve read other iterations of Gatsby and have mostly been underwhelmed, but something about Foy’s take seemed intriguing.

Set primarily in the Valley of Ashes, readers get a chance to meet new characters and revisit those who are more familiar. Jon Laine, an old acquaintance of Jay Gatsby steps into the shoes of narrator, giving readers an inside look into Gatsby & Wolfshiem’s ‘business’ dealings. Like Nick, Jon is from the Midwest. He agrees to come East to help an old friend and to make some good money, but we eventually realize that just as Nick is running from a failed relationship, Jon is running from his own family trauma.

Worlds collide when Jon is introduced to George Wilson and Jordan Baker, both players in Gatsby’s bootlegging game. These connections allow Foy to blend his new story with Fitzgerald’s old one. While I love that we get a fuller picture of George, I feel like Foy paints him as unstable too early on, taking away some of the vulnerability I see in him in the original novel.

This new version is also pretty tough on Fitzgerald’s core characters. While most of us are likely fine with the criticism he levies on Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, I think he goes a little too far in his censuring of Nick and Gatsby. I’m no Nick fan, but I don’t think his crimes are quite at the level of the East Egg set. And as for Gatsby, yes, he does get caught up in chasing his obsession, sometimes using the people around him to get closer to his goal, but I’ve always felt like his relationship with Nick in the original was sincere.

While the new parts of the story are really well done and are woven in seamlessly with Fitzgerald’s story, I found myself wishing for more new and less old. It also felt like there were a fair amount of breaks in the fourth wall where Foy stopped to tell readers what they should think about a situation rather than letting his own beautiful descriptions tell the story.

Fortunately, the end of the book was, to me, so spectacularly written that it made me look past these flaws. At the end, the story really becomes Jon’s story, nudging the original version into a supporting role. Jon’s vulnerability, grief, and guilt are real. He genuinely cares about fairness even though his life has been anything but. He owns his mistakes, and recognizes that trying to escape them is impossible; you can only find a way to live with them. Jon is everything I always wanted in a narrator that Nick could never quite manage to be. And that alone is reason enough to read this book.

"The Great Gatsby" is one of my favorite books, so I was excited to read "The Last Green Light", by George Foy. The story did not disappoint; I absolutely loved it. I will always consider it a companion book to "The Great Gatsby", and I recommend it highly.