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Prompted by the Baz Luhrman film, there has been a great deal of discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lately. Austin Allen at the Big Think offers a defense of the work:

Gatsby is not only a dissection of the American Dream but of dreams in general: their terrible necessity, their built-in futility. Its best lines on the subject–“the high price of living too long with a single dream”; “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”; “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”–have an almost scriptural quality, resonating far beyond their immediate context.

It’s also a particularly trenchant study of male desire, male illusion. Although the female characters in Gatsby don’t exactly come out looking well, there’s something ferocious about the way the book skewers men. What is Gatsby’s house but a failed mating display, one of the most extravagant in literature? Is there a harsher portrait of waning virility than Tom Buchanan: insecure bully and womanizer, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax”? Meanwhile George Wilson is a hysterical cuckold, and even Nick cuts a slightly Prufrockian figure, looking forward at thirty to “a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”