Michael Farris Smith. Nick. Little Brown, 2021.

I was looking forward to reading Nick. Critics seemed to like this novel supposedly about Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, before he met Jay Gatsby. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was really disappointed.

We meet Nick on the battlefields of France in World War I. He is an infantryman and sees plenty of horror. He becomes emotionally detached from what was going on, but he tries to connect with a young woman he meets in Paris while on leave. Here they are both somewhat disconnected. They like each other, but the directions of their lives are aimed differently. Nick ends up becoming a sapper and barely manages to survive an explosion. Much of the story is really about PTSD, or shell shock, as they called it in the Great War.

This guy is not the Nick Carraway of Gatsby. First, Nick undoubtedly would have been an officer. He had graduated from college in 1915. When Jay Gatsby first meets him in The Great Gatsby, he recognizes him and tells him what unit he served with. Gatsby was a major by the end of the war. His dealings with other units would have been at the officer level. While he would have fought with weapons, he would not have been the forward sapper and otherwise basic peon that the novel describes. Anthony Patch, the Harvard-educated protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned, was a private only because he failed the officers’ physical.

There are a few minor details that appear to be anachronisms. Nick buys a cup of coffee that he carries through a railroad station. Paper cups had been invented by World War I, but cups for hot drinks did not appear until around 1940. Even in the 1950s, Dunkin’ shops had ceramic cups—it was the doughnuts that could be taken home, not the coffee.

Nick speaks of a man with a buzz cut. That term was not used for a close haircut until after the Vietnam War.

World War I provided an impetus for men to begin to use wrist watches rather than pocket watches. At one point Nick has a wrist watch, but it later gets changed into a pocket watch. My own grandfather fought in WWI. At the time he had a pocket watch. Later on, probably some time in the twenties or thirties, he started using a wrist watch. That was pretty typical. In this novel it is a bit confusing.

Instead of returning home to the Midwest, Nick decides to decamp in New Orleans. There he lives among charity cases and befriends Judah, a war veteran who had it a lot worse than Nick. Scars cover parts of Judah’s face and body. He coughs up blood and his lungs barely work thanks to an enemy chemical gas attack. Judah also understandably has PTSD, compounded by the fact that his wife has left him to become a madam of a brothel.

This second half of Nick’s story goes back and forth almost aimlessly. I guess it is to suggest a certain aimlessness of a few war veterans. Here we see the truly low side or underbelly of criminal enterprises. This is a story of thugs and street crime—not the more sophisticated side of criminal enterprises we see with Meyer Wolfsheim and the connected Jay Gatsby. There is perhaps an interesting contrast, but, again, this hardly seems to be the Nick Carraway we meet in The Great Gatsby.

There are few minor echoes of Gatsby in this story. Judah cynically says that Nick thinks he is the most honest person he knows, but Judah says he thinks the same way about himself. And the very last chapter takes Nick to West Egg and tells us how he finally met up with his family in the Midwest and decided to move to New York. It does jibe with Nick telling us in Gatsby that when he declared his interest in leaving the family business and go East, his uncles had a confab and gave him permission, and his father said he would support him for a year. There is no inkling that he had any relatives in Louisville like Daisy Fay or her parents.

No, Nick is jarring, and has little to do with the bond salesman narrator of The Great Gatsby and the cousin of Daisy Buchanan who talks about the people in Chicago whom he has recently seen—no mention of them in this book. He does pass through Chicago on his way home, but says little about it.

However, something else is going on. The sense of detachment as in “Soldier’s Home” or “In Another Country,” the failed love affair like “The End of Something” or A Farewell to Arms, the suggestion of a miscarriage/abortion as in “Hills Like White Elephants” or A Farewell to Arms, a mother with some mental problems like “Indian Camp” and others, the whole PTSD theme as in “A Way You’ll Never Be” and others, the drinking and oblivion of “The Three Day Blow” or The Sun Also Rises, the crude boxers or street fighters as in “The Battler” or “The Light of the World” tell us that this is not a prequel to Fitzgerald but to Hemingway. This “Nick” is not Nick Carraway but Nick Adams.