Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix Review
A review of one of several Great Gatsby retellings that have recently been published.
One of the closest contenders for the Great American Novel, or at least as far as critics and scholars are concerned, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The novel’s about Jay Gatsby, a man who makes a name for himself by going into the bootleg liquor business during the early years of prohibition and becomes well-known for the extravagant parties he gives. The story’s narrator, Nick Carraway, starts getting close to him after he becomes his neighbor, and he develops a fascination for Gatsby and all the extravagance and mystery that surrounds him. He soon learns that Gatsby happens to be in love with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, whom he’d met years ago and is now married with a young daughter. His attempts to win her heart over ultimately fail, and this combined with his work in bootlegging lead him towards tragedy, leaving generations of readers with questions over how possible it is to truly achieve the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby entered the public domain on January 1st 2021, 95 years after it was published. Since then, there have been several novels published that have attempted to retell the story, with some of these retellings focusing on Nick trying to pursue a romantic relationship with Gatsby (since one common assumption of the original story is that Nick is possibly in love with Gatsby). One of these retellings is Anna- Marie McLemore’s 2022 novel Self-Made Boys, which was published as part of the Remixed Classics series, which focuses on retelling classic novels for young adult readers by featuring the characters as being of different racial/cultural backgrounds or sexual orientations to make the stories more diverse and relatable.
In this version of the story, Nick Carraway is Nicolas Caraveo, a Mexican-American teenager from Wisconsin who happens to be transgender. We don’t get the full story of what it was like for him being raised as a girl, but we do learn that his parents accepted him as soon as he told them about his identity, as did his cousin Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo, who he’d been close to ever since they were both children. Nick, who’s gifted when it comes to math, heads to New York City to get a job where he can use his talents to get a better life for himself and his family. As with the original story, Nick gets some wise advice from his father:
“’Recureda esto, Nicolas,’ he said. The World may look at you and see a pawn’ he pressed a carved piece of wood into my palm-‘but that just means they’ll never see your next move coming.’”
Upon arriving in West Egg, Nick figures out that Daisy is pretending to be white, having dyed her hair blond and gotten her skin to look slightly lighter, and now goes by Daisy Fay. She and Tom Buchanan aren’t married, but rather engaged and attempting to seek the approval of Tom’s parents. Tom has no idea that Daisy is Hispanic or that Nick is her cousin. He is at first somewhat polite towards Nick and claims that it’s his parents who don’t like racial minorities, although he makes it quite clear that he shares their opinions throughout the story.
Nick first meets his neighbor Jay Gatsby after he goes towards his yard drunk, after which Gatsby helps him get back home. His fascination with Gatsby begins right here. And it continues when he goes to one of Gatsby’s parties one day and notices as he takes his shirt off that he wears a side lacer around his chest just as he does, which makes him realize that Gatsby is transgender just like him. Gatsby then tells him that he’s become aware that Nick is just like himself and says, “Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”
Nick gets a job predicting the price of commodities. Those he works with instantly notice his talents and appreciate them, especially when Nick correctly names three of the four top industries in the country at the time (which were steel, railroads, automobiles, and movies, by the way). However, his boss still makes him go by Nick Carraway, continuing with the book’s theme of having to change parts of your identity to seek what you want.
He also finds out that Daisy and Gatsby had met before back when Daisy was making bandages for the Red Cross and attending patriotic dances during the first world war. She reveals in a letter that she never had much interest in getting married before despite how often boys were falling in love with her, but she’d gotten very close to Gatsby at the time, even though she said she didn’t know if she’d fallen in love with him. Either way, due to her ambitions, she couldn’t see herself marrying a poor boy, which was what had led to her current relationship with Tom Buchanan. Nick soon becomes convinced that Gatsby would be better for Daisy than Tom is, especially after finding out that Tom Buchanan is cheating on Daisy with Myrtle Wilson. Meanwhile, Gatsby revels an apparent interest in Daisy, constantly making his parties more extravagant in the hope that she will someday attend them, but it takes a long time for this to happen. He and Nick decide to hold a debutante party for Daisy, and although Tom doesn’t want that at first, he eventually gives in to their plans.
As for one of the major differences from the original story, Gatsby manages to get Nick to attend a party where there are many others like themselves- gays, lesbians, and others who are probably trans- and it’s here that the two of them have their first kiss, and it’s after this incident that Nick starts to wonder if he possibly has feelings for Gatsby. It’s also here that Nick meets Martha, a lesbian that’s been working with Gatsby. She becomes close to Nick and reveals certain important things to him, including how she and Gatsby are involved in the bootlegging business later in the story.
As for the character of Jordan Baker, Daisy’s closest friend, she turns out being both similar and different from the original character. She’s still a major golf player, and she still lets Nick in on Gatsby and all the rumors surrounding him. However, we soon learn that she’s Hispanic and, like Daisy, she’s been pretending to be white to get by in her career. And during the debutant party, Daisy turns out showing up not with Tom, Gatsby, or any other man, but rather with Jordan.
This gets a positive response from the attendants of the ball, but Nick soon finds out that it was Jordon, not Gatsby, whom Daisy had been in love with all along, meaning their sexuality was another thing they’d been hiding about themselves all along. Gatsby had been trying to pursue Daisy so that they could enter a lavender marriage, or a heterosexual marriage which one or two gay people entered while still pursuing same-sex relationships, and he wanted to know if Nick would be interested in doing the same with Jordan. By now, despite how Nick tries to deny his feelings about Gatsby at certain points, it’s clear that he loves Gatsby just as much as Gatsby loves him. They don’t end up pursing a lavender marriage, yet they both get into some trouble with Tom, leading to the story’s ending. For those of you who disliked the original ending, I’m happy to say that this version does not end tragically, although some things about it did seem a little far-fetched to me.
Also, Gatsby never calls Nick “Old Sport” in this version. Make of that what you will.
Personally, I can’t say The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite classics. It’s not really because high school English ruined it for me. In fact, I actually read this book on my own when I was seventeen because I got a copy of it at a place that offered free books, and due to my interest in classic novels (I’d read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice the year before on my own and loved them both), I wanted to see if this novel would make a similar impression on me. Upon reading it, I thought it was a decent story. I liked how it gives readers a good look into how society was like in the 1920s as only something written at the time could, including the impact of the prohibition era. However, I still didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped I would. It focused a little too much on rich people gathering together and gossip for me to completely love the story. The downfall of Gatsby and the revelation of who he really was were probably the most interesting parts for me, and I probably would have liked the story more if its focus had been on Gatsby’s background and his rise and fall rather than just being told through an observer’s point of view.
Because of this, my feelings about this retelling are slightly similar to the way I felt about the original story. We still get a good look into the way society was in the 1920s, which was one of the main things I liked about the original story, and it’s slightly better here because we also see what it was like for ethnic and sexual minorities. I do appreciate some of the changes they made for Nick’s character, which I thought made him more interesting and relatable. Daisy also comes across as slightly more sympathetic. She still makes certain bad decisions, but we can understand her motives a little more. I also like how it showed the way minorities would sometimes have to hide or change things about themselves in order to make it within mainstream American society, including their own names (as was often the case with immigrants and actors). McLemore, who is Hispanic and non-binary, said that the 1929 novel Passing by Nella Larsen, in which a Black woman discovers that an old friend of hers is now passing off as white while being married to a racist white man, served as inspiration for the story. Having read that story myself earlier this year, I can certainly see the parallels between these two stories, especially considering how Daisy’s relationship with Tom Buchanan is. Although it wasn’t always the case that there were official distinctions between Hispanics and those considered “white”, Hispanics could still be subject to discrimination, and we see just how hard things could have gotten for them in this novel.
On the other hand, it still includes a lot on high society and their everyday activities, making it a little dull at times. Also, the way the novel presents how those of different gender identities and sexual orientations saw themselves back then doesn’t feel completely realistic.
We’ve most likely always had transgender individuals among us, even though we didn’t always have accurate words to describe them, the best understanding of what being transgender means, or the attitudes needed to accept them. Around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we saw some of the first attempts at understanding those we’d now consider LGBT individuals through a field known as sexology. Sexology largely focused on the study of sexual inversion, which was how homosexuality was often referred to back then. Its’ impact was rather mixed. On the one hand, sexologists often insisted that sexual inversion was an innate condition rather than just a mental illness or a sin and often advocated for acceptance of such individuals within society, making them some of the first people to affirm sexual minorities within modern history. On the other hand, some sexologists seemed to think certain traits had to be present within individuals to know for sure they were this way, such as women being very tall with deep voices, and they’d claim among other things, that heterosexual women weren’t as likely to enjoy sexual activity as sexually inverted women were, therefore contributing to certain sexist notions that were prevalent within society back then.
One famous sexologist was Magnus Hirschfield, a German who worked with individuals who would now be considered transgender, including one of the first people to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. He had a research center in which it’s said that a lot of the research he’d done on transgender individuals had been stored. This center was unfortunately destroyed during the 1930s; had this not been the case, we probably would have had more knowledge on transgender people from the early 20th century.
Self-Made Boys does not refer to any of this at all throughout the story. I can understand why, since sexology seemed to promote almost as much questionable ideas as it did positive ones, and maybe the author just wanted to keep things simple for readers and not go into the more complex ideas behind gender identity and sexual orientation in the 1920s. However, we still get little information on how Nick or Gatsby came to understand that they were transgender, and only a few details on how they eventually transitioned. Perhaps it would have been helpful for readers to have gotten more information on how they’d been when they were living as girls, or to have seen one of the characters doing research on what was known on gender identity and sexual orientation back then and concluding they were different in some way.
Also, despite the insistence on the author that they tried to stick to terms that were historically accurate despite how dated some of them were, we still have the characters describing themselves as gay. As far as I know, using the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals did not come to be widely used among the community until around the 1960s or 70s. Back in the 1920s, gay people would have most likely used the term “invert”, short for sexual inversion (and the term used in the famous 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness), to describe themselves. However, they did correctly include the word “lesbian”, which has a longer history of usage among gay women. I do realize that it can be difficult to know how to use certain terms within historical fiction correctly, especially when it comes to terms used within the LGBT community-since many were often simultaneously used for affirmation and rejection- but writers should still try to be as accurate as possible.
Nevertheless, Self-Made Boys is still a mostly solid retelling that could inspire more interest in the original story among teenage readers. The whole Remixed Classics series has much that could inspire more young readers to enjoy classics. Aside from this book, I’ve also read Bethany Marrow’s So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix, in which the March sisters are reimagined as part of a black family that escaped slavery and is now living in an established colony for freed people during the American Civil War. Other books in the series include What Souls Are Made Of, which retells Wuthering Heights and My Dear Henry, which retells Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This can be a fun way to see how certain classics are being retold and how people have been using stories that are in the public domain.
However, Self-Made Boys is their only book based on a story that has recently entered public domain, other retellings are from stories that have been in the public domain for years. I’d be more interested in finding novels that have retold stories that recently entered the public domain, but there haven’t been that many that I’m aware of. However, there have been an abundance of retellings of The Great Gatsby in the past two years, so I may just have to work with those for now.
One that has gotten my attention is Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, in which Jordan Baker is reimagined as Vietnamese, bisexual, and…a demon. I tried reading the e-book a while ago but just couldn’t get too far with it.
However, I might get back to it for this public domain project, especially since I’ve heard it’s one of the better Gatsby retellings and not some farfetched attempt at horror, as my description would probably leave some to believe. Other retellings include Jillian Cantor’s Beautiful Little Fools, which involves the investigation of Gatsby’s murder and has Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Catherine McCoy, sister of Myrtle Wilson, as the main suspects, and Michael Farris Smith’s Nick, where we learn about Nick Carraway’s war experiences and the trauma he struggles with afterward, Kristen Briggs’ The Great Gatsby Undead, in which Gatsby’s a vampire, and The Greater Gatsby, which is apparently AI- generated.
Yes, someone actually went that far with the last one, bringing to life some of the worst fears creators have right now, but this still gives readers a good mix of stories to see how this classic novel is being retold. I still hope we’ll eventually get retellings of other recent public domain stories in the future, but I’ll still be looking forward to looking into other Gatsby retellings for the time being.