Vo follows suit, refraining from stuffing The Chosen and the Beautiful with elaborate worldbuilding or explanations of how the supernatural elements operate. It is an interruption, a magic-lantern show that transpires in the course of a single summer and evaporates with the crisping of the air.
#Great gatsby author full#
Vo understands that while The Great Gatsby is a novel full of excesses, its secret lies in Fitzgerald’s lightness of touch. It was utterly exhausting to be a woman.” Cantor’s Daisy could not even come up with a line as mildly clever as the first one Fitzgerald’s utters with her stuttering laugh, “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” And the saucy, wise-cracking Jordan Baker of The Great Gatsby is unrecognizable as the apprehensive woman who, in Beautiful Little Fools, thinks of men, “They were all the same, weren’t they? They all wanted nothing more than to ruin me. But if so, then Nick somehow also made them more witty and dashing. It could be argued that the view of Daisy, Jordan, and Catherine afforded by The Great Gatsby is distorted by the imperfect understanding of Nick Carraway, and that Cantor’s version testifies to a truth about gender relations in 1922 to which Nick, and possibly Fitzgerald himself, was oblivious. They are also extremely dull, and indistinguishable in voice and temperament. The men in Beautiful Little Fools are all selfish brutes and the women are, if not outright saints, remarkably noble, selfless, and long-suffering. The Chosen and the Beautiful makes much bigger changes to Fitzgerald’s novel without sacrificing the gossamer charm of the original. Daisy’s emotional life revolves around her grief for her virtuous younger sister, killed in a railway accident, who used to implore her to “Be good,” and Daisy strives to do justice to her memory. Cantor’s Daisy doesn’t marry Tom because his wealth and social status match her own, but because her late father blew the family’s fortune at the racetrack, and if she doesn’t marry money, her mother will have to sell their house. In the Fitzgerald novel, Tom and Daisy’s infant daughter never seems to figure significantly in anyone’s thoughts or decisions, to an almost comical degree in Beautiful Little Fools, Daisy is a doting reader of bedtime stories who’d like to fire the nanny and care for Pammy full time, only Tom won’t let her. Jordan didn’t cheat in a golf tournament she was targeted by a homophobic official who’d discovered her affair with another player. The rest of Beautiful Little Fools follows this pattern: Any situation from the original novel in which a female character might be found at fault has been carefully reworked to render her blameless and victimized.
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