‘The Gatsby Code: A Century of Dreams and Disillusion’
By Bob Batchelor
Foreword by Jerome Charyn
Tudor City Books, 250 Pages

First published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel “The Great Gatsby” has been transformed into a compelling biography and cultural history.

I’m not sure any other character in American literature has been the subject of a book written as a biography. In the novel, we have to piece together the figure of Gatsby, born James Gatz in North Dakota. He takes on the new name as a means of burnishing the glamour of a Galahad who seeks to recover the favor of Daisy, married to a menacing millionaire, Tom Buchanan. A scion of old money, Buchanan scorns the upstart Gatsby, who flaunts his fortune in parties on his Long Island estate meant to impress everyone that he has made it.

The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, comfortably wealthy, is fascinated and repelled by Gatsby’s insatiable need to impress high society with lavish spending made possible by his apparent participation in various nefarious schemes.

That Fitzgerald never specifies exactly how Gatsby acquires his riches and sequesters Gatsby from direct contact with gangsters — such New Yorker Arnold Rothstein (fixer of the 1919 World Series), Midwest bootlegger king George Remus, and, most infamous of all, Chicago crime boss Al Capone — promotes a certain mystique, as do the gentlemanly pretensions expressed in Gatsby’s favorite form of address to acquaintances: “old sport.”

Bob Batchelor, an astute literary critic and biographer,  has published a biography of George Remus, and he sees Gatsby from more angles than are available to Nick Carraway. Distinguished novelist Jerome Charyn, compares Mr. Batchelor to a 1940s private eye. Think of Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon,” realizing that his Daisy, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), is not worth the kind of trouble that Gatsby endures to win his Daisy, who is selfish and thoughtless, and complicit in her husband’s corrupt world.

As Mr. Batchelor points out, Gatsby never realizes that he is probably in love only with an idealized Daisy, dirtied by the unworthy Tom. At the crucial moment, Daisy does not side with Gatsby in his confrontation with her husband. Does Gatsby finally understand that he has pursued an illusion?

Mr. Batchelor thinks nothing can destroy Gatsby’s drive to acquire fame, fortune, and love any more than generations of readers who have cared little about his grim end — the destruction of his dream of Daisy and of his very life when he is murdered in circumstances set up by the perfidious Tom.

Mr. Batchelor treats “The Great Gatsby” as a novel about the American dream, which entails more of everything. At its maniacal worst, the American dream is about the acquisition of money, power, and love that is insatiable: No such thing as too much money, too many parties, too much acclaim.

Mr. Batchelor notes that when the novel first appeared it received a tepid reception — nothing like earlier novels and stories with huge sales that made Fitzgerald the author of what he called “the Jazz Age.”

As a biographer is wont to do, Mr. Batchelor cites the parallels with Fitzgerald’s own fall from grace, his inability to hold on to wealth and fame any more than George Remus was able to do. That Gatsby is, in the end, a failure, though, seems not to have deterred others from pursuing the American dream in just as determined a fashion as Gatsby.

What Mr. Batchelor shows is that notwithstanding Gatsby’s misfortune, the portrayal of his striving continues to bemuse readers who now build their fortunes and images on social media, a phenomenon Mr. Batchelor explores with considerable insight and acerbity.

There is considerable repetition in this book, as, for example, the Remus-Rothstein-Capone troika reappear in chapter after chapter, but this is not a fault but a manifestation of the American obsession with criminal entrepreneurs, industrial magnates, and tech titans. They seem to swirl together in the public imagination, no matter if they are cornering the crime market in Chicago, the illicit liquor trade in the Midwest, or capitalizing on a promised colonization of Mars.

The lavish show-off splendor of a Gatsby has its contemporary analogues named by Mr. Batchelor as he sums up a novel that is even more relevant today than when it was published a century ago.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”