Take Owl Eyes (or so he’s called, for his large spectacles), one of the many partygoers at Gatsby’s mansion. When we first meet him, he has wandered into the library and doesn’t seem able to escape — he stands paralyzed, staring at the books in inebriated admiration.
I wonder if we’re all Owl Eyes now. In the century or so since “The Great Gatsby” was published, we have been lost in Gatsby’s house, immured in a never-ending revival.
I imagined Nana sitting down at her desk in the nursing home and thinking of us. Writing to say that my cousin got engaged, what she heard on the news that day or how big the season’s wheat crop was. It didn’t matter that it was indecipherable. The letter was as much about the form as the content – the care taken, the time spent. So different to the messages and tweets we shoot off with little more than a moment’s thought. It brought to mind that old adage by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”
This is a frothy and exciting book with a beautifully constructed world full of Emmylou Harris, femme fatales, bar fights, jarring investigations, incompetent cops, nosy neighbors, and twisty revelations. But for the reader who wants a little ambiguity and mess in their crime novel, a little terror that hits a little too close to home, this book may appeal as well.
His ability to see so clearly is made possible by the fact that it is his father who is dead. Neither the artist nor the observer can ever truly remove themselves from the experience of art. “In the Land of the Cyclops” proves that Knausgaard’s struggle is still ongoing, the search for truth as a balance between reality and our experience of it: “This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy.”
This is Vanderbilt’s great revelation – that in a world where apps constantly rate us and measure our performance, so that learning anything becomes another form of work, we should enjoy the process more and worry less about the product. All he achieves in the end is a modest competency in various unrelated activities. But it has brought him “an immense and almost forgotten kind of pleasure”. This book conveys that pleasure and is itself a pleasure to read.