A Critic's Meta-Review: 4/5
Listen up, old sports and new sports alike. As a matter of fact, this review will probably be of much more practical use to the newer sports among us than their older counterparts (if there even exists a modern counterpart, or at least a well-developed one, to the era in which this story is set). You see, on the surface, this book seems like a nostalgia trip, a vanity affair, a regurgitation of the same old tropes about the allegedly “roaring” Jazz Age in which people all throughout the United States began to find out just what exactly was meant by the phrase “gettin’ jiggy wit it” (and this a good three and a half score prior to the release of the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff song of the same name, which bore virtually no resemblance to any of the auditory arrangements heralded in the Fitzgerald era; alas, by that time the sonic landscape had been moulded by so many arising and passing sensations, flowing through an infinite loop, that it was no longer able to recall the regality of its ragtime roots and had to resort to cheap chicanery to conjure up a few coos from the day’s wandering waxwings - for bupkis, if you ask me [but why would you?]).
In The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (named after the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” - the one song you definitely don’t want to mess up at a rodeo - and, puzzlingly unbeknownst to most, a steadfast anti-abolition advocate, who used the power of his position as Federal District Attorney to personally prosecute the nation’s prominent proponents of abolition, who he viewed as radical extremists. Yet this guy has a bridge named after him. A bridge that I pass by every single day…*sigh*).
Also worth noting (something my old English tutor Casey actually got me hip to) is F. Scott (Fitzgerald, not Key - keep up, kid, keep up)’s continual misspelling of the word “judgment”, which he writes as “judgement”.
Wait a minute...apparently, it can be spelled both ways. Damn.
Now I feel kind of bad. We spent a good chunk of one tutoring session clowning my man F.S.F for the clumsy lettering, and now, come to find out, the only fools in this scenario were Casey and I.
Couple of mooks, heads in our books.
Man, this whole world’s got me shook.