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sophia_sol) wrote2023-01-16 04:20 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2023-01-16 04:20 pm
Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, by Anna-Marie McLemore
Look, there's another queer Great Gatsby novel, obviously I had to give it a try! This one's premise is: what if Nick and Gatsby were trans men and also explicitly textually into each other, plus Nick and Daisy are Latinx. And like, yeah, sure, I'm in!
Unfortunately, though I think the book is successful at what it's doing, it turned out to not work for me personally on several different levels. It's a good, readable, thoughtful, queer book with coherent themes and sympathetic yet imperfect characters doing their best, which should be my jam. And just about every criticism I'm able to come up with, there are reasonable reasons the choices were made, and I can understand and sometimes even appreciate those choices! And yet as a whole I was left dissatisfied.
Okay, so, like the original, Self-Made Boys is told from the first person pov of Nick, but this version is much more interested in Nick's interiority and Nick's life. We get to hear about his family, his job, his worries, his attraction to Gatsby, his feelings about his identity, his relationship with his cousin Daisy, and so on. He's also more willing and interested in sharing what he understands of the feelings and motivations of the people around him.
Overall the effect of this is to show the reader a bunch of people (Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan) who are much nicer and more sympathetic and more earnest than their analogues in the original, which....I have mixed feelings about. Yes it's more pleasant to read about people like this, but they all feel like fundamentally different people than the characters in The Great Gatsby. Which, idk, maybe is fine and the point? I think I'm affected here by my understanding from fandom of the ~correct~ approach to fanfic, which is that even when writing an AU the goal is to write the characters to be recognizably the same characters, with the only alterations being due to the choices of the specific points of departure, and all other changes must emanate logically from those points. But when I think about it, it IS perfectly reasonable to say "I want to write a story with the same general shape as the original canon, but with different people in the roles of the characters, and see how the story plays out differently with these other characters. I will give my original characters the same names as the roles they're taking, for simplicity in following the story." I'm just not used to this approach and it feels weird to me!!!!
Anyway. One of the choices made in this remix was to cast much younger characters in each of the main roles. All of Gatsby & Nick & Daisy & Jordan are still in their teens. This really threw me at first. I was all, "teen gatsby why????" But by the end I did get it. It actually fits in well with a theme in The Great Gatsby of all these people acting in the roles they feel they need to, instead of being their authentic selves, whatever their authentic self may happen to be. These teens are playacting at being adults as well, another layer of distance between semblance and reality, and Daisy's efforts to be white-passing add yet another layer to the dance. Even so, though, Gatsby the 19 year old war veteran and wildly successful businessman is a bit much.
One of the things that threw me in the reading of the book is...well, something I have no good solution for. The author says in their note at the end that they very deliberately chose to avoid using any racial slurs in the book that might have been used in the era, which I am definitely on board with; and the terms Latina/e/o/x are all too new to use (Latino/a dates from the 40's). But the chosen replacement term still feels far too jarringly modern to my ears. Nick refers to himself regularly as "brown" as his main form of racial identity throughout, which from my understanding is a relatively modern way of using the term, so every time I read it, it distanced me a little from the notion that this is a book that takes place in the 1920's. But I might not have all the information here, so if you have further details on the use of "brown" as a racial identifier historically, please do let me know!
But what jarred me even more is that Nick kept referring to himself and Gatsby as "boys" throughout the whole book. This also felt weirdly modern! Idk I haven't done, like, specific research into social perceptions of adulthood over the last century or so but I have a real sense that there being a definite transition between childhood and adulthood is something that's been lost in western culture over that time. Nick is living an adult life! Pretty sure he would -- or at least would WANT TO -- think of himself as a man! And him looking at Gatsby, even more so, as Gatsby is older than him and has all the trappings of success and independence to boot.
These identity words were the thing that stood out to me most as not fitting into the time period the book is set in, but honestly, the book as a whole did not feel to me like it did a good job of really embedding itself in its context. It felt to me like the time and the place were set-dressing for the story Self-Made Boys was telling, instead of being intrinsic to the point like it was in The Great Gatsby. And again....that's a choice that's reasonable for a narrative to make? But it makes me, at least, like the book less, both as a stand-alone novel and as a remix of Gatsby.
Another complaint from me about this book is that I am too ace and thus Daisy being in love with Jordan felt like it came completely out of nowhere, to me! After the reveal, the narrative mentions several of the clues from earlier that Nick feels stupid for having not picked up on, and then I got to feel silly too :P. Like, Daisy has a whole speech to Nick early in the book about how she's just not into men like that, and what I had taken from the speech was that she's ace, not that she's lesbian! Anyway that made the reveal of the Daisy/Jordan relationship feel like a Surprise Twist Ending shoved in instead of being actually integrated into the story, because the clues were not at all visible to me as clues, and so I was just irritated by the reveal instead of being pleased about it!
My final complaint is that the prose felt occasionally a little too try-hard for me, and in places its efforts to be beautiful or dreamy or evocative or descriptive just felt flat to me. But I know taste in prose is wildly subjective.
So like. As I said. My issues with this book are me problems, and I can imagine a different reader experiencing this as a five-star book, where for me it's solidly 3 stars and not a bit more.
So I'm nil out of 2 so far on queer Gatsby retellings that work for me. But if/when I hear about another one, though, I will return, ever-hopeful that maybe the next one will be the one that works for me!
Unfortunately, though I think the book is successful at what it's doing, it turned out to not work for me personally on several different levels. It's a good, readable, thoughtful, queer book with coherent themes and sympathetic yet imperfect characters doing their best, which should be my jam. And just about every criticism I'm able to come up with, there are reasonable reasons the choices were made, and I can understand and sometimes even appreciate those choices! And yet as a whole I was left dissatisfied.
Okay, so, like the original, Self-Made Boys is told from the first person pov of Nick, but this version is much more interested in Nick's interiority and Nick's life. We get to hear about his family, his job, his worries, his attraction to Gatsby, his feelings about his identity, his relationship with his cousin Daisy, and so on. He's also more willing and interested in sharing what he understands of the feelings and motivations of the people around him.
Overall the effect of this is to show the reader a bunch of people (Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan) who are much nicer and more sympathetic and more earnest than their analogues in the original, which....I have mixed feelings about. Yes it's more pleasant to read about people like this, but they all feel like fundamentally different people than the characters in The Great Gatsby. Which, idk, maybe is fine and the point? I think I'm affected here by my understanding from fandom of the ~correct~ approach to fanfic, which is that even when writing an AU the goal is to write the characters to be recognizably the same characters, with the only alterations being due to the choices of the specific points of departure, and all other changes must emanate logically from those points. But when I think about it, it IS perfectly reasonable to say "I want to write a story with the same general shape as the original canon, but with different people in the roles of the characters, and see how the story plays out differently with these other characters. I will give my original characters the same names as the roles they're taking, for simplicity in following the story." I'm just not used to this approach and it feels weird to me!!!!
Anyway. One of the choices made in this remix was to cast much younger characters in each of the main roles. All of Gatsby & Nick & Daisy & Jordan are still in their teens. This really threw me at first. I was all, "teen gatsby why????" But by the end I did get it. It actually fits in well with a theme in The Great Gatsby of all these people acting in the roles they feel they need to, instead of being their authentic selves, whatever their authentic self may happen to be. These teens are playacting at being adults as well, another layer of distance between semblance and reality, and Daisy's efforts to be white-passing add yet another layer to the dance. Even so, though, Gatsby the 19 year old war veteran and wildly successful businessman is a bit much.
One of the things that threw me in the reading of the book is...well, something I have no good solution for. The author says in their note at the end that they very deliberately chose to avoid using any racial slurs in the book that might have been used in the era, which I am definitely on board with; and the terms Latina/e/o/x are all too new to use (Latino/a dates from the 40's). But the chosen replacement term still feels far too jarringly modern to my ears. Nick refers to himself regularly as "brown" as his main form of racial identity throughout, which from my understanding is a relatively modern way of using the term, so every time I read it, it distanced me a little from the notion that this is a book that takes place in the 1920's. But I might not have all the information here, so if you have further details on the use of "brown" as a racial identifier historically, please do let me know!
But what jarred me even more is that Nick kept referring to himself and Gatsby as "boys" throughout the whole book. This also felt weirdly modern! Idk I haven't done, like, specific research into social perceptions of adulthood over the last century or so but I have a real sense that there being a definite transition between childhood and adulthood is something that's been lost in western culture over that time. Nick is living an adult life! Pretty sure he would -- or at least would WANT TO -- think of himself as a man! And him looking at Gatsby, even more so, as Gatsby is older than him and has all the trappings of success and independence to boot.
These identity words were the thing that stood out to me most as not fitting into the time period the book is set in, but honestly, the book as a whole did not feel to me like it did a good job of really embedding itself in its context. It felt to me like the time and the place were set-dressing for the story Self-Made Boys was telling, instead of being intrinsic to the point like it was in The Great Gatsby. And again....that's a choice that's reasonable for a narrative to make? But it makes me, at least, like the book less, both as a stand-alone novel and as a remix of Gatsby.
Another complaint from me about this book is that I am too ace and thus Daisy being in love with Jordan felt like it came completely out of nowhere, to me! After the reveal, the narrative mentions several of the clues from earlier that Nick feels stupid for having not picked up on, and then I got to feel silly too :P. Like, Daisy has a whole speech to Nick early in the book about how she's just not into men like that, and what I had taken from the speech was that she's ace, not that she's lesbian! Anyway that made the reveal of the Daisy/Jordan relationship feel like a Surprise Twist Ending shoved in instead of being actually integrated into the story, because the clues were not at all visible to me as clues, and so I was just irritated by the reveal instead of being pleased about it!
My final complaint is that the prose felt occasionally a little too try-hard for me, and in places its efforts to be beautiful or dreamy or evocative or descriptive just felt flat to me. But I know taste in prose is wildly subjective.
So like. As I said. My issues with this book are me problems, and I can imagine a different reader experiencing this as a five-star book, where for me it's solidly 3 stars and not a bit more.
So I'm nil out of 2 so far on queer Gatsby retellings that work for me. But if/when I hear about another one, though, I will return, ever-hopeful that maybe the next one will be the one that works for me!