Book Review: The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by Aya Morton, text adapted by Fred Fordham (2020)

 

The striking cover of The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by Aya Morton, text adapted by Fred Fordham, 2020. Photo by Mark C. Taylor, taken on my Fitzgerald bookshelf of course, old sport.

Sample page from The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel.

Meyer Wolfshiem, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway all look strikingly similar. (Forgive the cropping of this photo-trying to take a picture of images on a page is surprisingly difficult.)

Jay Gatsby confronts the Buchanans in his pink suit at the Plaza Hotel.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby enters the public domain on January 1, 2021, we can expect to be bombarded with all sorts of new interpretations of the book. Novelist Michael Farris Smith has a prequel, Nick, all set to go on January 5, 2021. (As interesting as Nick Carraway is, isn’t it Jay Gatz’s backstory that we all want to know, old sport?) Fitzgerald’s descendants know that there’s nothing they can legally do to prevent all of these impending knock-offs and interpretations, so they sanctioned their own official graphic novel of The Great Gatsby, with text adapted by Fred Fordham, and illustrations by Aya Morton. The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel is published by Scribner’s, who have been Fitzgerald’s publisher since the appearance of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. The graphic novel features an introduction by Blake Hazard, Scott and Zelda’s great-granddaughter.

The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel, is an excellent introduction to the novel itself, and it may well succeed in drawing new readers to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. I was especially impressed with the textual adaptation by Fred Fordham. (Fordham did the adaptation and illustrations for the 2018 graphic novel of To Kill a Mockingbird.) I didn’t do a side by side comparison, but Fordham’s text felt very faithful to Fitzgerald’s words. There were plot points and descriptions that were missing in the graphic novel, but I didn’t notice many descriptions that had been added or invented by Fordham. One place where I keenly felt the absence of Fitzgerald’s words was the description of the “valley of ashes,” and the giant eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.

I had more issues with the illustrations by Aya Morton. The illustrations are done in what looks like watercolor, so the images look rather pale on the page. Morton does a fine job at capturing the Art Deco interiors and fashion of the 1920’s. Where Morton falls short is in her drawings of people. Every character looks pretty much the same. There’s little difference between the faces of Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, and Meyer Wolfshiem. Also, there’s not much difference in the facial expressions of the characters, which robs the graphic novel of some of its drama.

Some things, a line of dialogue or description, struck me more in the graphic novel format than they have in the novel. An example would be this sentence from Nick’s narration: “As for Tom, the fact that he had ‘some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.” It’s interesting to me how Fitzgerald, who does not seem to have been much of a progressive on racial matters, smartly made Tom Buchanan such a pompous ass in part by making him super racist. It’s a brilliant strategy that still works now, 95 years later, as the reader immediately hates Tom.

I was struck again by what a compact masterpiece The Great Gatsby is. There’s so much in the novel that is left unsaid, so many questions we don’t know the answers to. The more I read Gatsby, the more I want to know about those things that Fitzgerald doesn’t tell us, the scenes he doesn’t show us. What are Nick and Jordan Baker’s dates like? What happens when Daisy and Gatsby are finally alone together?

Visually, The Great Gatsby is a very striking novel: Gatsby’s yellow car, his pink suit, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, are all indelible images that remain in the reader’s mind long after they’ve finished reading. It’s an excellent candidate for the graphic novel treatment, and I just wish that this adaptation was as perfect as the novel itself.