K. Woodman-Maynard. The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Candlewick, 2021.

Wow! Already a 2021 book reviewed here! This is a lovely graphic novel based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Virtually all the narration and spoken lines are taken from the book. In that sense, it is like watching a BBC miniseries based on a classic novel.

The illustrations are very effective. They have a pastel and gauzy character to them. We understand in part that this is the way Nick Carraway remembers the story. We all notice different things even when we witness the same event as another person. I am reminded of Tennessee Williams stage directions for The Glass Menagerie, which he calls a “memory play.” He imagines diffuse lighting and even some scenes set behind a gauze screen. This has a similar idea.

The pastels and the blue shades are almost dreamlike, but that is one of the themes. Kids today talk about the American Dream, and that may be part of it, but the story is Gatsby’s dream. Fitzgerald wrote a short story with a similar plot called “Winter Dreams.” That and Gatsby both were about a dream of an elusive and, ultimately, illusory love.

Because of the visual effect of the graphic novel, one sentence in the novel that never made sense to me does now. Towards the end as Nick is reflecting on the lost vision of Jay Gatsby’s and says, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Why orgastic? In both the novel and in this graphic novel, any sexuality is an undercurrent, not explicit but humming in the background like Gatsby’s hydroplane. It suggests something intense but fleeting.

Seeing Gatsby in the graphic novel form, we get the sense of the elusive beauty and even temptation that Daisy was for Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s dream was kind of an impossible one, like a teenager’s love fantasy. For Gatsby himself it was something more, but at its core, his dream was mere carnality, like an orgasm, or even one of his parties, making a mess and letting someone else clean up after it. Recall that Fitzgerald’s own title for the story referred to a story of a Roman debauch known as “Trimalchio’s Feast.”

As a teacher, of course, my concern would be that some students would be tempted to read this comic book version and think they had read the novel. That is not the case, but the illustrator does a clever job of turning some of Fitzgerald’s metaphors from the word picture into a literal picture. If things are exaggerated, perhaps that is because they stood out in Nick Carraway’s or Jay Gatsby’s minds.

The two-page artist commentary at the end is interesting. I noted right away from the beginning that she got one thing “wrong” about Daisy, just as every existing film version of The Great Gatsby has: The novel tells us Daisy had brown hair, but every visual portrays her as a blonde. Woodman-Maynard recognized this but simply confesses, “I couldn’t reconcile Daisy being a brunette” (231).

She also believed that Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Meyer Wolfsheim was anti-Semitic. I never thought about that one way or the other. She made a point of not using Wolfsheim’s dialect as the novel does. That may be a sign of the times. It was not unusual for writers of all kinds to use dialect—Twain, the Brontës, Poe, Dickens, and on and on. Nowadays, I guess that may be considered insensitive.

As noted by many, Fitzgerald based Wolfsheim on Arnold Rothstein, who was Jewish and involved organized crime. If there is any ethnic animus expressed in the tale, it is by Tom Buchanan spouting his “scientific” Nordic race theories. Tom is the least sympathetic character in the novel. It seems to me, if anything, Fitzgerald is expressing concern about people taking such theories too seriously and “making messes,” which is exactly what would be happening in Central Europe in about a decade. If anything, that would oppose anti-Semitism.

The physical portrayal of Wolfsheim in by Woodman-Maynard reminded me of a portrait of Joseph Conrad, vaguely Eastern European. She always has him in a shadow, which is precisely where he belongs, behind the scenes, and gone before anyone notices.

She also asserts that Nick Carraway is an “unreliable narrator.” She explains what she means, but it seems like her definition is different from what I have come to understand. An unreliable narrator lies or twists things. Carraway does not really do any of those things. Yes, few people have photographic memories, so everyone will notice different things and see things from their limited perspective. Nick is no different, but he is telling the story of Jay Gatsby. Some people, for example, might be more interested in the Nick-Jordan relationship, but that is not Nick’s focus in the story. Besides, if he were really trying to cover things up, he would not have included the manner in which he broke up with her.

Still, those are minor quibbles and worth a discussion. For getting the atmospherics of The Great Gatsby, readers who appreciate the novel would probably enjoy this creative presentation of the Gatsby story.

N.B. I noted that this version spelled Wolfsheim’s name as Wolfshiem. This is the way that the online version of The Great Gatsby found on the Gutenberg Australia site spells it, too. However, when I checked the Scribner’s print version, Fitzgerald’s publisher, it is spelled Wolfsheim. That does correspond to the German name “Wolf village.” Also, that spelling is not flagged on my WordPress spell checker.