Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
Chaos. Bloody towels litter the bathroom floor. Women scold and soothe. Myrtle, weeping and bleeding, tries to staunch the flow with a copy of Town Tattle spread over the tapestry. Mr. McKee rouses, stares at the scene, then shuffles out. Nick picks up his hat and follows. In the descending elevator, McKee mumbles about lunch; Nick agrees without hearing. He has a vague memory of standing by McKee’s bed as the photographer mutters titles—Beauty and the Beast… Loneliness…—before he is lying half-awake on a hard bench in the cold, fluorescent lower level of Pennsylvania Station, watching the early morning light bleach the headlines of the Tribune, waiting for the four o’clock train. The whole experience leaves him with a haunting sense of the inexhaustible variety of life, a spectacle at once mesmerizing and repellent.
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Music spilled across the water from Gatsby’s mansion throughout the summer, pulling guests toward the lights like insects drawn to flame. The parties operated with mechanical precision: on weekends, his Rolls-Royce shuttled crowds between the city and Long Island while his station wagon met every incoming train. By Monday morning, eight servants descended on the property with mops and hammers to erase the damage. Every Friday, crates of citrus arrived from a New York fruiterer; by Monday, a mountain of hollow rinds was carried out the back door. Caterers arrived fortnightly with canvas and colored lights to convert the grounds into a brilliant stage, where buffet tables displayed spiced hams and gilded turkeys, and a stocked bar poured cordials from bottles so antiquated that younger guests could not identify them.
The orchestra came at seven—not a modest ensemble but a full complement of brass, strings, and winds. Swimmers emerged from the beach to dress for the evening. Cars jammed the drive five deep. The garden bloomed with vivid colors and bobbed hairstyles while cocktails circulated through the twilight until conversation and laughter saturated the air. Groups formed and dissolved in the same breath, faces swimming together under shifting lights. Then a woman in shimmering opal snatched a drink for courage and danced alone on the platform, and the night truly began.
Nick Carraway arrived bearing one of the few genuine invitations Gatsby had issued. A chauffeur had delivered the formal note that morning, expressing the host’s desire to meet his neighbor. Dressed in white flannels, Nick wandered the grounds feeling conspicuous among strangers, though he recognized a few faces from his commuting train. He noticed clusters of young Englishmen, lean and earnest, pitching bonds or insurance to wealthier Americans, clearly hunting the easy money floating through the garden.
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