Good golly Great Gatsby

Now I'm no literary critic. But I have known how to read for at least two or three years. And in my brief capacity as a literate American, I had come to think that The Great Gatsby was a book about the hollowness--even destructiveness--of an American dream fundamentally rooted in the pursuit of material success.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read this article in today's New York Times.

Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.