Weighing the 'Great' in 'Gatsby'

Please move up close to the page. I'm about to make a shocking revelation, and I'd like to keep it between us.

Bear in mind that I make my living as a novelist, reviewer, and critic, and that as a teacher I'm known to roam about classrooms endlessly extolling the virtues of such obscure and foreign figures as Marek Hlasko, Boris Vian, and Blaise Cendrars.

Here's the revelation: I've never read ''The Great Gatsby."

I know, I know. One of the great American novels. A masterpiece. All but perfect. Limpid. Luminous. Yet, at least until last week, I'd never read it.

(And this is not even to mention See America First.)

The funny part is, I believed I had. As much as I knew about it, surely at some point I must have read the thing. And here's where the shameful memories shoulder in: I'm reasonably certain that I've spoken of this novel at length to writing students, referring to the peripheral first-person narrator in discussions of point of view and, in other contexts, discoursing on the great American fantasy of reinventing the self. Or some such.

But last week as I read, slowly I realized this was virgin territory. No footprints. Not Friday's, not my own.

-- Hello there, Gatsby, I don't believe we've met. I've heard a lot about you. Nice suit.

As a million voices buzz around us, here at the great cocktail party that's Literature, where you never know who's likely to show up.

So now you're going to ask me what I thought of the book, of course.

Well (and here's the part where I look about nervously, reiterating that this is just between you and me), not a lot, I'm afraid. I tried to like it, I really did. I mean, how many times had one of my teachers (or -- the horror! -- I myself) referred to Fitzgerald's brilliant use of Nick Carraway as narrator? How often have I heard the novel called a masterpiece, a great love story, even the very story of America itself? I mean, this racehorse is a stone champion. So I tried, smiling with true pleasure again and again at Fitzgerald's gift for language and description, as in Nick's first meeting with Daisy:

''They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor."

But finally, I'm afraid, a faint admiration is the best I could come up with. Sure, I love the voice, as in: ''Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." (Anytime that I gets in your ear, I tell students, whether first-person central or peripheral, start asking yourself to what extent you can trust the narrator.) Still, the whole time, there was another voice -- that of the little devil on my left shoulder, by the good ear, the one that kept clearing its throat and whispering stuff like:

Kinda thin, don't you think?

What, you believe these characters? They act like anybody you know?

Guy does everything, money, huge house, the works, just to get close to this girl he's had the hots for for years, huh? Sure he does!

What's with this Nick guy anyway?

And so on.

Now, obviously the little devil and I are both wrong about this novel. (See above: masterpiece, etc.) Several million viewers -- make that readers -- can't be wrong. Just as obviously, I'm right about another thing, that you can't trust the narrator -- as in this case. But I thought I'd read it, I really did.

Some years back it occurred to me that a literary subgenre had gone unrecognized, one that comprised books concerning, and in fact replacing, a book that never got written -- Frederick Exley's ''A Fan's Notes" and Joe McGinnis's ''Heroes," for instance. Cleverly plundering Frost for my title, I wrote an essay about these, ''The Book Not Written," never suspecting that someday I might have to couple it with one concerning books unread.

In that essay I quoted Montaigne: ''Were I to select some subject that I had to pursue, I might not be able to keep up with it." Last week I finally caught up with ''The Great Gatsby" -- or it caught up with me.

Can I tell you one more thing before you go?

Weather's nice today. Wind whispers in trees, birds scour newly mown grass for seed and crawly things. I've been sitting here for over an hour with a copy of ''The Sound and the Fury" on the desk before me.

I'm afraid to open it.

James Sallis's latest novel is ''Cypress Grove" (Walker), his latest collection ''A City Equal to My Desire" (Wildside/Point Blank).