Why F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is greater than ever at 100

This week both a Patti Smith memoir and a new Thomas Pynchon novel were announced, giving us plenty to look forward to later in the year. But for today’s Bookmarks we’re looking back, to a novel that celebrated its centenary on Thursday: F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I ask experts and novelists why they think its appeal is stronger than ever, right after this week’s picks. And author Charlie Porter shares his reading recommendations.

In some ways, there are practical reasons for the continued success of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: it’s short, and “one of the more accessible classic novels”, as writer Derek Owusu puts it. Plus, it’s “on the curriculum in so many different countries”, so even those who don’t read much as adults are aware of it, having studied it at school.

“It’s a very, very complex book that, on the surface, appears relatively simple and relatively easy to read,” says Michael Nowlin, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada and editor of The Cambridge Companion to F Scott Fitzgerald. It’s also, in some ways, a love story “and that’s always perennially popular”, he says.

Not to mention the fact that it’s brilliantly well written. Gatsby’s prose is “unmatched”, according to University of London professor and Fitzgerald expert Sarah Churchwell: “lyrical, exact and endlessly quotable.”

“What I love most about it is the intensity of the language, the energy of the voice of each character as expressed through Nick,” Owusu says – he reads the novel regularly, sometimes packing it in his bag so he can “read a random chapter on [his] commute” to get himself out of a reading slump or give him inspiration for his own work.

But surely there are deeper reasons why we are still so enthralled by the character of Jay Gatsby, 100 years after readers were first introduced to him? “Gatsby is ‘gorgeous’ to other characters and readers because he’s the embodiment of ‘what if?’”, the novelist Jane Crowther wrote earlier this week in the Guardian.

In other words, the character – and the book itself – is about the very human desire to imagine and dream of a better life, or what could have been. “Who among us hasn’t, at some stage, wanted to call back some halcyon chapter of the past and hold on to it for ever?” says Claire Anderson-Wheeler, whose debut novel is a Gatsby-inspired mystery.

That Gatsby-esque idea of reinventing yourself has become particularly relatable in recent years: “In a world where everybody has a Facebook account, everybody has an Instagram account, it is possible now, it seems to me, to pretend to be something you aren’t in the face of the world,” says emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Jackson R Bryer. “You could be a Gatsby.”

Gatsby’s position as “other” also allows any reader who has ever felt like an outsider to connect with the novel.

“The most intriguing thing I’ve come across about it in recent times is the theory that it’s a book about passing,” says novelist Hari Kunzru. In his 2004 book The Tragic Black Buck, Carlyle van Thompson, a professor at Medgar Evers College, argues that Fitzgerald “guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ Black individual who passes for white”.

“That was something that had definitely not immediately occurred to me,” Kunzru says, but he finds the idea fascinating, given the novel’s “persistence of interest in Gatsby coming out of nowhere”, along with “Tom’s obsession with racial purity”. He has also heard interpretations of the novel that argue narrator Nick Carraway and his love interest Jordan Baker could be gay characters who are in a “lavender relationship”, playing into one of the novel’s themes, “that everybody’s hiding something in this world”.

Though he doesn’t feel qualified to say whether Fitzgerald himself might have been thinking these things – Nowlin is “very sceptical” of the idea that Gatsby was intentionally written as a person of colour.

In some ways it doesn’t matter whether Gatsby is meant to be Black or white, says Bryer. “What he is, is other. He is not part of the ruling class in the world of the novel. And he is an outsider. And his great threat to the insiders is that he is an outsider. And that’s what ultimately destroys him … Any other is what he stands for.”

The threat of the “other” is another reason The Great Gatsby is so relevant today, Bryer thinks, because it ties into anxieties about immigration – the “fear that we are being taken over”.

The idea of the super-rich being “careless” is of course another almost spookily resonant theme of the novel when we read it through a modern lens. In fact, former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams’s controversial new book about what it was like working with Mark Zuckerberg took its title, Careless People, from a Gatsby quote:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

“That’s probably the most pertinent line of the novel right now, because I think it is about the insouciance of the wealthy and the extent to which America became a country dominated by the super-wealthy,” Nowlin says.

And though those critical of today’s billionaires might view them as destructive, oppressive Tom Buchanan figures, Owusu imagines that “Bezos, Zuck and Musk … fancy themselves as Gatsby” – dreamers who have built themselves up from nothing.

Owusu thinks the themes of Gatsby are relevant at the other end of the income scale too: “We have older generations of drug dealers who prey on young boys from their areas … boys equipped like Gatsby with false names and mannerisms, who convince them they’ll have money if they sell this or that, the same way Meyer Wolfsheim recruited Gatsby into the bootlegging business, abandoning him later on when there could be police involvement around his death.”

Ultimately, Gatsby is “a novel about the necessity of hope in a society where the powerful face no consequences”, Churchwell says. It “keeps speaking to us because it knew, long before we did, how easy it is for carelessness to hide behind glamour – and how often history moves backwards while insisting it’s racing ahead.”

The most vital book of the season is THING, edited by Robert Ford, Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren. It’s a compilation of all 10 issues of the Chicago-based independent magazine that charted Black queer counterculture in the late 80s and early 90s. Wit, intelligence, compassion and taste show how writing could have been, if racism hadn’t prevented Black writers from being able to do what they could do.

In his latest graphic novel, Blurry, Dash Shaw has such control of the narrative. At one point he lets a character enter a fog: some of his frames are just of nothing. Shaw interweaves lives that ricochet off seemingly small moments, blurring into one another.

It has been incredible to watch Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line take off since its publication in February, with author Elizabeth Lovatt regularly selling out talks around the country. It shows what a good book can do: spark conversations that need to be had. Lovatt meticulously researched the 90s phone logs of the helpline for queer women, while also writing about the research process and her own coming out. It is essential reading for anyone interested in community, visibility and how we yearn to speak for ourselves.

Speedboat by Renata Adler is an abrasive jolt of a novel, like an astringent. Written in 1976, every sentence of this debut brings you up short. Adler’s work is a constant reminder of the need for alertness.

• Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter is published by Particular (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.