Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” is one of the most famous and revered voices in American literature. He is a trustworthy reporter, and seems objective, even though he is Daisy Buchanan’s cousin. We admire his ability to understand, when no one else seems to, what Gatsby is all about, what kind of idealism drives Gatsby. Nick sees more than a newly rich upstart in a pink suit who gives stupidly large, vulgar parties. The good reader is impressed when Nick tells Gatsby “They’re a rotten crowd….You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
As central as he is, we know very little about Nick. We know he is from the Midwest, as are all the others. He, like Tom Buchanan, went to Yale. He mentions that his father advised him to remember “all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had,” which has made Nick slow to judge and willing to listen to others’ stories.
The cover of “Nick,” Michael Farris Smith’s sixth novel, would lead you to believe that Smith’s novel will tell the story behind the story of the events of that summer on Long Island. It does not. “Nick” is a prequel. The action opens in France at the Western front. From “Gatsby,” we knew that Nick had “participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.” He says: “I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.”
In “Gatsby,” Nick never mentions the horrors of his time in battle. Smith’s descriptions of trench warfare, the blood and the mud, are brilliant and disturbing. The fighting is endless and pointless; the chances of survival or any kind of success are nil. Nick suffers from shell shock—while he is the trenches—no post-traumatic anything. His nerves are already shot. His right hand trembles uncontrollably.
These first few chapters make Nick seem to me more like Hemingway’s Nick Adams of “Big Two-Hearted River” than Fitzgerald’s Carraway. Mustered out, Nick cannot bring himself to go home to the family hardware business. He travels instead to New Orleans where life in the Quarter is nearly as violent, bloody and pointless as life in the trenches. This is a French Quarter previously unknown to American literature: saloons and brothels, yes, but without a semblance of festivity. Nick meets a fellow vet, Judah, who has been gassed and is dying. New Orleans, no less than Jake Barnes’ Paris, is a casualty of the Great War—a loud, jazz-filled drunken Wasteland.
Smith’s novel is powerful, haunting and can absolutely stand alone, but it ends, as we knew it would, with Carraway, now listlessly engaged in the bond business, moving to West Egg on Long Island, renting a little bungalow and looking out over the bay at a distant dock. But now we know who he is and how he got there and it is time to read “Gatsby” again.
