This morning, as the snow fell faintly through the universe and faintly fell, I remained burrowed in my bedcovers to finish Corrigan’s insightful book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (2014).

It’s all over, Nick decrees on the very last page of the novel.

But he does so in the most beautiful sentences ever written about America. Gatsby’s fall from grace may be grim, but the language of the novel is buoyant; Fitzgerald’s plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible. Gatsby has it both ways. Far from being an easy read sized just right for quick digesting by our nation’s high-school students, The Great Gatsby is an elegant trickster of a novel, spinning out all sorts of inspired and contradictory poetic patter about American identity and possibilities.