As examples of classroom reading that should be red flagged, the article cited such classic works of literature as Huckleberry Finn (racism), the Merchant of Venice (anti-Semitism) and The Great Gatsby (“a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence.”) A draft guide circulated at Oberlin College in Ohio further suggests flagging anything that smacks of “classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism [bias against the transgendered], ableism [bias against the handicapped], and other issues of privilege and oppression.” Anything else?

With Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto winning best actor and best supporting actor from numerous awards groups, they are the unquestioned frontrunners in the Oscar race. McConaughey famously lost more than 40 pounds to portray real-life AIDS victim Ron Woodruff. The Dallas resident refused to see his disease as a death sentence and began smuggling experimental medications into the U.S., then selling them to others with HIV. Leto plays a transgender woman who was created by screenwriters as a composite of numerous people in Woodruff’s life. 

Luhrmann, in typical fashion, has crafted a film that is visually fascinating and thematically powerful. His “Great Gatsby” is a towering affair that uses melodrama, high-octane music and an impressive cast to present a vivid picture of the roaring ’20s and a compelling tale of obsessive love and class oppression. The story is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), an alcoholic and failed writer who examines his past while receiving treatment in a sanatorium. 

The truth is, Zelda has become the stuff of myth.  It’s no surprise, then, that St. Martin’s Press has just released Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler.  It’s a daunting enterprise, putting words in Zelda’s mouth, imagining her rich emotional life, whether jumping in a fountain in Washington Square, pinioned against a wall by Ernest Hemingway in a supposed sexual assault, painting watercolors from within sanitarium walls, or listening in bed to a husband’s cobbled dreams that may involve a sexual tryst with the same Hemingway.

A film robs you of imagining the world of a novel as you want to, while a novel cannot as accurately capture the televisual world we now live in. Part of Gatsby’s appeal is its depiction of a time when the American dream was a promising ideal, when the U.S. was not, as Horace from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010) puts it, a “fat, demented pimp.” The Great Gatsby was written when the U.S. was on the upswing, and now that the nation is in decline, it makes sense that there will be nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’.