Nick

August 15, 2020
A dark and often gripping story that imagines the narrator of The Great Gatsby in the years before that book began. Nick grows up in a Minnesota "neighborhood of sidewalks and shade trees" and goes to Yale and then to war. On leave in Paris, he's with a woman he loves for too short a time and loses her. He survives the trenches, the scuttling over no man's land, the tunnels where a man alone listens for the sound of the enemy setting explosives. On his way home, he makes a detour to New Orleans and finds himself "privy to the secret griefs" (as he says in Gatsby) of a brothel owner and her estranged husband, a war veteran scarred by mustard gas and stifled love. Smith is a talented writer known mainly for his gritty evocations of violence, struggle, and loss in the U.S. South, such as those in Blackwood (2020). Here he creates, in the war and New Orleans, nightmarish worlds where Nick reckons with demons and maybe redemption. These are places far from the staid tension and off-stage deaths of Gatsby. Smith inevitably goes well beyond the sparse biographical details--Yale, the Midwest, the family hardware business, World War I, and bond trading--that F. Scott Fitzgerald provided for his narrator, who exists to bring other lives into view, not expose his own. The new Nick is a man fully realized, with a mind tormented by the war and by a first love that waned too fast to a fingernail moon of bitter memory. Whatever Smith had in mind when he began this project, he could have many readers wondering in some meta-anachronism how Fitzgerald's Nick could fail to allude to any of the hell Smith puts him through. A compelling character study and a thoroughly unconventional prequel.

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October 12, 2020
Smith (Blackwood) offers an evocative if underwhelming origin story for Great Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway. The reader first finds Nick fighting in the trenches during WWI. Then, on leave in Paris, he promptly falls for a French girl named Ella, who becomes sick and sends Nick away. He returns to the front and volunteers for highly dangerous missions, and upon the war’s end returns to Paris only to find Ella gone. Once back stateside, a dejected Nick impulsively takes a train to New Orleans—where he’s drawn to a whorehouse madame and becomes confessor to her saloon-owner ex-husband and other habitués of this debauched demimonde—before moving on to Long Island. As in Gatsby, Nick is more observer than participant, which makes him problematic as a main character; unlike in Fitzgerald’s novel, Nick’s function here isn’t clear. While the war chapters offer striking imagery, the New Orleans section pushes Nick to the margins of an arbitrary story, and by the time he heads north readers won’t have any deeper understanding of him than they do on page one. Smith’s effort is a noble one, but it doesn’t do enough to deepen the reader’s understanding of one of 20th-century American literature’s enduring characters.

November 1, 2020
Noir is as adaptable as a writer dares to make it, which Smith shows in this compelling prequel to The Great Gatsby. An American soldier in WWI called only Nick--in Paris on furlough--embarks on a doomed love affair with a woman who's nursing her own demons; after returning to the front, a romantically shattered Nick volunteers for a stint tunneling into no-man's land. Smith's evocation of trench warfare is strewn with rats and body parts, but, really, he's just warming up. The novel's next section finds Nick in New Orleans, unable to face his father's hardware store in Minnesota and searching instead for a hellscape to equal the one he's escaped. He finds it by shadowing a fellow war victim and his wife, an embittered madam, as they play out an opium-fueled danse macabre. Another retreat follows, and Nick's version takes him to a cottage across Long Island Sound from a flashing green light. It makes peculiar sense: Nick is an observer compelled to watch tragedy unfold, whether in a tunnel, a New Orleans brothel, or under the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2020

Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, but very little is known of his life before he arrived on Long Island. This latest novel from Smith (Desperation Road; The Hands of Strangers) imagines his backstory. Serving as a soldier in World War I, Nick spends dark and lonely nights reminiscing about his childhood in Minnesota, the tragedy of his mother's illness, and the love of his life, Ella. Juxtaposing violent scenes of warfare and loss with his memories of love and family, Smith envisions Nick as an amalgamation of grief, empathy, and violence. Disillusioned after the war and wanting to avoid the dullness of his hometown, Nick heads to New Orleans, where he falls into alcoholism, destitution, and a convoluted arsonist plot. However, much as Fitzgerald wrote the character, Nick is merely witness to, never involved with, the stories and personalities constellating around him. VERDICT Those expecting a prequel to The Great Gatsby will be disappointed, but just as Fitzgerald dismantled the myth of American exceptionalism with The Great Gatsby, Smith punctuates the longing and despair that underlie the American dream with this work.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2021

This eponymous novel introduces readers to Nick, an American soldier, so captivated by a woman in Paris that that he contemplates not returning to the horrors of the battlefield. This imagining of the life of The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway includes flashbacks to a childhood with his deeply depressed mother leading to a difficult journey that includes numerous traumas, from events in the trenches and tunnels that would send him home with well-deserved and understandable PTSD, to the loss of his lover and their baby. Nick, initially presented as a young, educated man, commenting that his favorite books were written by Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, has a postwar life that is no easier. He finds himself in pre-Prohibition New Orleans, a world of drugs and violence. There, he becomes unwittingly involved in another doomed romance, through which he will be given a way to see his world and the part he has played in it, preparing him to start a new life. The text also grows more literary as Nick matures, beginning with large sections made up of short, choppy sentences and long, rambling run-on sentences that omit punctuation marks such as quotation marks, commas, and hyphens. VERDICT A book that libraries with and readers of The Great Gatsby will want to have in their collection.-Betsy Fraser, Calgary Public Library, Canada

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.