There’s something off about The Gatsby Gambit’s epigrams. One draws from the children‘s classic Harriet the Spy (“to yourself you must always tell the truth”); the other from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, warning of glamour’s capacity to conceal evil. Yet the novel responds more directly to The Great Gatsby‘s weary observation that the best thing a girl can be is “a pretty little fool”.
It’s this idea that Anderson-Wheeler attempts to subvert through the character of Greta Gatsby, Jay’s 21-year-old sister, who serves as narrator. Newly graduated from finishing school, Greta arrives in East Egg sporting a fresh bob, harem pants and a desire to “learn something about the world besides the art of watercolour”.
While she proves as charming and persistent as her brother, she lacks Nick Carraway’s poetic sensibility as a memoirist. To her, Jay is simply “drawn to women who were either hard to please or hopelessly unavailable”, while Nick is “quieter than the others and less prone to smiling”.
In this spin-off story, Nick, Jordan Baker and a cast of Buchanans have moved into the Gatsby mansion for an extended stay. When a gunshot goes off at the end of the first chapter, Greta transforms from schoolgirl to sleuth in order to discover who‘s responsible for the killing. As she searches for clues in gambling dens and high-society soirées, she teams up with Carraway, with whom she shares a certain spark.
I’ll be clear: The Gatsby Gambit isn‘t a homage to The Great Gatsby; it’s an imitation of Agatha Christie written at Fitzgerald’s expense. The novel uses Gatsby as set dressing for an utterly straightforward whodunit.
[ Dazzling tragedy of The Great Gatsby still stalks the American imaginationOpens in new window ]
Though Greta’s feminist leanings and class consciousness hint at fresh perspectives, they never materialise; the novel substitutes Fitzgerald’s enchanting exploration of desire, class and country with ethical absolutism, replacing his characters’ yearning with disillusionment. Its prose is perfectly serviceable but Greta’s descriptions of the Jazz Age feel more researched than realistic.
The result is a marketer’s dream – and a literary reader’s nightmare. In a way, The Gatsby Gambit ironically creates what a downcast Nick Carraway briefly wishes for at the very beginning of the original novel, something that Fitzgerald rallied against: a tepid world “in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever”.
