OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile
NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan’s voice is familiar and agreeable, and her account of her long interest in—and near obsession with—Fitzgerald’s matchless novel is a feast for those who share her passion. At 10 hours, her discussion of “How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures,” is just about the length of the novel itself—and even shares the cover art of a familiar paperback edition. The novel, Fitzgerald’s life, and a near-century of assessments of both book and author are the interlocking pieces of a story that is sad, and even pathetic, at times but in dozens of ways enhances our affection for both the novel and its author. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Daphne Merkin
So We Read On abounds in pleasures of the text, whether it is tracing the theme of water in Gatsby, dipping in and out of Fitzgerald's biography so as to illuminate the novel or the state of mind of the man who wrote it, or ingeniously linking the book's underside—its "shadowy atmosphere of criminals, bootleggers and violence"—with a genre of hard-boiled novels and noir films that postdate it…The biggest compliment I can give this book is that it will send you back to the source, as it sent me. And that it leaves indelible impressions of both the novel and its author…
Publishers Weekly
07/28/2014
Mixing criticism with memoir, NPR book critic Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading) contends that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel is greater than we think. According to Corrigan, we were too young to appreciate The Great Gatsby when we read it in high school; we were dead to its themes of nostalgia and regret, overlooked its trenchant social critique, and mistook it for a love story. (Corrigan is adamant that we miss the point if we ask whether Daisy ever loved Gatsby.) To reintroduce and reassess a masterpiece, Corrigan visits the book’s Long Island setting, Fitzgerald’s grave, and a high school English class. Most illuminating, though, is her research into Gatsby’s reception: in the Library of Congress, she investigates how the novel, unheralded on its publication in 1925, became part of the canon by the 1960s. (Fitzgerald’s ghost can thank a few friendly critics and the paperbacks issued to GIs during WWII.) Today, Corrigan asserts, Gatsby still doesn’t get its due. When she laments that Fitzgerald is the subject of fewer college seminars than are his modernist cohorts, such as James Joyce, her partisanship may seem blinkered. She makes a good case, however, that our very familiarity with Gatsby’s Great American qualities has caused us to underrate it—and she does much to restore its stature. 13 b&w photos. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Maureen Corrigan has produced a minor miracle: a book about The Great Gatsby that stands up to Gatsby itself."—Michael Cunningham
"No one is better at bringing a book to life than Maureen Corrigan. Her vividly personal evocation of Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby is at once a labor of love, the story of a quest, and a mother lode of information and insight. As a biography of a novel, it reads like a novel."— Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark
"Second only to the pleasure of re-reading Gatsby is the pleasure of talking to someone about it, and Maureen Corrigan is the ultimate someone: boundlessly erudite, blazingly funny, and infectiously passionate. . . . As with the book that inspired it, my only complaint about So We Read On is that it comes to an end."—Susan Choi, author of My Education
"An intoxicating cocktail of talent, celebrity, gangster noir, and the vicissitudes of reputation that create a classic."— Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars
"As pleasurable to read as Fitzgerald's. ... It's smart and compelling, persuasive without demeaning other interpretations...a gorgeous treat."—The Washington Post
"We have to be thankful to Maureen Corrigan for letting us in on her intriguing love affairs with great books, as in this wonderful account of her grand passion for The GreatGatsby. She reminds us that perhaps one true promise of that elusive green light at the end of the dock resides in our creative imagination, and the intimate relationship between a book and its reader."—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination
"Corrigan's research was as intrepid as her analysis is ardent and expert, and she brings fact, thought, feelings, and personal experiences together in a buoyant, illuminating, and affecting narrative about one depthless novel, the transforming art of reading, and the endless tides that tumble together life and literature."— Booklist (Starred Review)
"A literary love letter... [Corrigan's] tone is lively and bright and her enthusiasm for the novel is infectious. You'll feel as if you're attending a lecture by your favorite prof or chatting with a brainy, bookish friend. Bursting with intellectual energy and fun facts, this paean to the 'great American novel will appeal to fans of Corrigan's book critiques and Jazz Age scholars, and will, one hopes, impel readers to pick up the brief work for the first (or fourth, or 14th) time."— Library Journal (Starred Review)
"So We Read On is a fine book on many levels, almost too many to list. This book is a love story about a book. It's an expression of love for one of the most lyrical and engaging and prescient novels in the English language. Maureen Corrigan writes not only with passion about her subject, she writes with an understanding of America and the elusive goal represented by the green light on Daisy's dock."—James Lee Burke
"Coaxing us aboard her narrative Tilt-A-Whirl, Corrigan spins us from topic to topic and back again, each revolution both reminding and enriching."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"So We Read On is a marvelous mix of the high and the low: solid literary criticism delivered in a user-friendly manner, coupled with the back story of the book's creation, replete with the sordid details of Scott (and Zelda) Fitzgerald's sad, unfulfilled promise."—BookPage
"Too genuine and moving to be resisted...[a] generous spirit warms every page of So We Read On."—The Boston Globe
"NPR's resident Fitzgerald aficionado delivers the college seminar we all wish we'd taken."
—O, The Oprah Magazine
OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile
NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan’s voice is familiar and agreeable, and her account of her long interest in—and near obsession with—Fitzgerald’s matchless novel is a feast for those who share her passion. At 10 hours, her discussion of “How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures,” is just about the length of the novel itself—and even shares the cover art of a familiar paperback edition. The novel, Fitzgerald’s life, and a near-century of assessments of both book and author are the interlocking pieces of a story that is sad, and even pathetic, at times but in dozens of ways enhances our affection for both the novel and its author. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-07-09
NPR book critic Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, 2005) offers an occasionally self-indulgent but mostly spot-on reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest novel—and, according to some critics, the greatest novel in American literature.Those who knowThe Great Gatsbyonly through Baz Luhrmann’s recent outing with Leonardo DiCaprio don’t know the book at all, for, among other things, writes Corrigan, Luhrmann had a “larger project, I think, to defang the novel’s class criticism.” A fundamental uneasiness underliesGatsby: As rich as the title character is, he can never make his way into the much more rarefied world of the Old Rich; as rich as he is, he cannot ward off fate, justice, karma and what Corrigan wisely calls “the Void.” If Corrigan occasionally offers reading-group notes for the cashmere-sweater set—yes, Zelda was a loon; yes, Scott was a bad drunk; yes, Hemingway was an asshole—at other times, she’s right on the case, turning up fascinating and sometimes-controversial gems: Could part of Gatsby’s mystery lie in a mixed-race past? As to the race front, why is it that Fitzgerald has Tom Buchanan reading a book with the titleThe Rise of the Colored Empires, a book thinly modeled on one that Fitzgerald’s own publisher had just released? There’s much flowing under the surface of Fitzgerald’s novel, and though Corrigan puts too much emphasis on herself and not enough on Jay and company(“I try to breathe deep and accept my powerlessness, as recommended by the on-line daily meditation program I sporadically log onto”), she does a good job of pointing out what we should be paying attention to, which goes far beyond billboards and chandeliers.Corrigan’s close reading is welcome, though one hopes that readers will first revisit Fitzgerald’s pages before dipping into hers.
