I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.

In no order here goes

1. Blood meridian

2. The Bell Jar

3. Of Mice and Men

4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird

6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)

7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)

8. Portrait of a Lady

9. Infinite Jest

10. Go tell it on the mountain

Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list

I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.

Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.

I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.

Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.

Fitzgerald's style is a pretty linear development out of early Joyce, say Dubliners and the first episodes of Ulysses. It compares to Woolf and McCarthy just fine.

Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise:

  So
  Walter Arensberg,
  Alfred Kreymborg,
  Carl Sandburg,
  Louis Untermeyer,
  Eunice Tietjens,
  Clara Shanafelt,
  James Oppenheim,
  Maxwell Bodenheim,
  Richard Glaenzer,
  Scharmel Iris,
  Conrad Aiken,
  I place your names here
  So that you may live
  If only as names,
  Sinuous, mauve-colored names,
  In the Juvenalia
  Of my collected editions.

I never really understood Infinite Jest, and I've tried to read it several times over the past couple of decades. I don't really get on with the "wacky wacky wacky" nonsense humour, and the constant sesquipedalian polysyllablism in every incongruent sentence makes it read like it was written by a smartarse 14-year-old who has just found they can look up long words in a thesaurus and thinks it makes them sound clever.

It's hard work to read with no payoff, I guess unless you like endless drivelling descriptions of drug use, which I don't.