Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby's story from the very start. Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in 1925, Fitzgerald declared that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." Fellow writers like Edith Wharton admired it plenty, but as the critic Maureen Corrigan relates in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, popular reviewers read it as crime fiction, and were decidedly underwhelmed by it at that. Fitzgerald's Latest A Dud, ran a headline in the New York World. The novel achieved only so-so sales, and by the time of the author's death in 1940, copies of a very modest second print run had long since been remaindered.
One of the formulas created by the Machine can be used to compute the value of a universal constant called Catalan’s number more efficiently than any previous human-discovered formulas. But the Ramanujan Machine is imagined not to take over mathematics, so much as provide a sort of feeding line for existing mathematicians.
It’s not that the morbid weight of Childhood is overemphasized, but that we can’t yet comprehend its towering figure in full until the trilogy’s completion. Childhood, Youth, and Dependency unfold with an arsenal of foreshadow in the place of exposition.
He opens his eyes. His eyes
the color of its gray coat, his chest
dressed in a single gold cross,