Beautiful writing, as to be expected from MFS. I wasn't captured by the story, it seemed disjointed, the characters didn't seem to be a part of Nick's story, I didn't understand the connection. But...that is me, maybe I missed the big picture and was trying too hard to connect the dots. The trauma, mental and physical damage experienced by the men fighting in WWI is my main take away, MFS does a superb job telling their story. Not my favorites MFS novel, but he is still a favorite. ( )

And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognize it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.

This book purports to be a prequel to The Great Gatsby, an exploration of the earlier life of Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator. While some might say we learn little of Nick in Gatsby, I would disagree. I have always felt I knew exactly who he was, so I was in a bit of trepidation at picking up this novel. I’m not a fan of retelling stories or expanding on characters. It is seldom done well.

I address that first, because I want to say emphatically that this is NOT a retelling or in my opinion even an expansion of an existing character. I felt this Nick had no correlation to Fitzgerald’s Nick, in fact, I would have been more persuaded that he was Nick Adams than Nick Carraway. You need not have even read Gatsby to fully appreciate this story. Not to beat a dead horse, but if I could change anything about this novel it would be this unnecessary and tenuous tie-in that seems in truth to be more of a marketing decision–Michael Farris Smith does not need to attach his books to F. Scott Fitzgerald to make them have appeal!

What made me read this novel, in fact, was its author, Michael Farris Smith. I have read several of his other novels and found them excellent fare. This one is no exception, it is reflective of his style and his ability to spin a great story and hold you on the edge of your seat. Everything in this novel is uniquely his, from the vivid and painful war scenes to the dual love stories…if you can call them that. He has an uncanny way of making a strange or unusual character seem very real and acceptable, in fact, downright relatable.

We find ourselves, upon opening the book, on the battlefields of World War I France. As brutal wars go, WWI was particularly horrid, with far reaching effects on those who fought and survived.

And this was the worst time of day. After the fight and after the recovery and before nightfall. Those who remained waited for the sounds and they came, the voices from no man’s land. The calls for help. The strained cries of dying.

Nick is no exception to this rule, he is suffering. A brief encounter with a girl while on leave in Paris complicates matters even further, and sets in motion a haunting that he carries home with him to the States. Unable to take up his life with his parents in the midwest, he finds his way to New Orleans, where he finds his days of being a front-row witness to tragedy are not over.

...he folded the paper and set it on the floor next to the chair and he said to the attic the world repeats itself. He said it with certainty as if it was something he had always known but just now found the courage to admit. I have been here before and I will be here again.

Perhaps the question this book poses is How do you live through a trauma, an unspeakable horror, and then find the way to fashion a life that is not a reflection of that? Takes the ultimate in courage, I think, and yet so many people have done it throughout history. Maybe one of the side effects is that you know what can be lost and you appreciate life so much more for it.
( )

If Michael Farris Smith hadn't written Nick as a prequel to The Great Gatsby, this review would be about a disturbing novel recounting not just a soldier's horrible experiences during the First World War but the long, emotional aftermath as well. If The Great Gatsby wasn't my favorite book, and rereading it wasn't like listening to all my favorite albums and singing along, I would probably have enjoyed this book as an anti-war novel and sympathize with Nick's belief that the events that befall him are self-inflicted wounds for—as he himself puts it—the sin of surviving the war.

If.

But The Great Gatsby is my favorite book, and the disconnect between the Nick of West Egg and the one who haunts Paris and New Orleans was too great a chasm for me to leap while reading this novel. What happens to this younger Nick before his time in the East turns older Nick's claim—that he is but a provincially squeamish mid-Westerner repulsed by the self-preserving lies of the Buchanans—into a self-serving compliment if not an outright lie. The Nick who trudges through this novel bears no resemblance to the optimistic, naive bond salesman who finds "so much to read...and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" of New York. The Nick of this book who works in his father's hardware store is not a man who hails from "prominent, well-to-do people [of a] Middle Western city." And the Nick who lingers for days in Union Station in Chicago to avoid Christmas at home doesn't share, let alone mention, the vivid, happy memories of transiting through this same train station on his way home from prep school and college.

If, however, you either haven't read or aren't enthralled with The Great Gatsby, you might well enjoy Nick. It's characters are, if not admirable, at least colorful and engaging in a can't-turn-away-from-the-car-wreck sort of way. The story delves engagingly into the seedy underside of life, replete with drunks, hookers, an arsonist - all the worst people who make a novel memorable. The writing flows rather well.

There are some minor weaknesses in the novel. Without its intermittent references to the war, the lack of period-specific details leaves you feeling it could occur in any number of periods. For example, the description of young Nick playing—"The straight and smooth sidewalks of his childhood and riding bikes in the summer with a baseball mitt hanging over the handlebars and half a dozen others trailing behind as they rode to the elementary school playground and started up a game that began with the goodnatured charm of boyhood but always ended in an argument."—could as easily describe my summer days in the '70s as Nick's of the '10s. Halfway through the book the point-of-view suddenly shifts from third-person singular to third-person omniscient. The shift works, but I questioned both why it doesn't occur until this point of the story and why we weren't privy to the thoughts of Nick's paramour in the first half of the novel. Despite these mild complaints, the story of Nick's sojourn through France and Louisiana makes interesting reading.

But all the things that work in the novel are ultimately undone by Smith's decision to link this story to the more famous novel. Perhaps if you weren't aware of the connection going in (and it is interesting that Smith never reveals Nick's last name). Perhaps in that scenario it would only dawn on you at the end, as Nick contemplates a minute green light across Long Island Sound that might be the end of a dock. Unfortunately, even that image is destroyed when, instead of the mysterious Gatsby stretching his arms out longingly towards the green light, it is Nick who reaches out, although only to the warmth of the rising sun. I am especially curious—beyond wondering at this decision to link the two novels—why, when Nick's first-person voice so strongly reveals his character in The Great Gatsby, did Smith choose third-person for this book? Without the tie-in, the voice would be perfectly in tune with the emotional resonance of the novel. Because of my foreknowledge of Nick's identity, I couldn't get that other narrative voice out of my mind the whole time I was reading.

One revelation I had while reading Nick: it is apparent that Fitzgerald never experienced war. Had he done so, he never would have written that his narrator "enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that [he] came back restless." Restless is much too weak an adjective to describe the emotional state of the broken ex-soldier in this novel, and it is impossible to reconcile his perspective with that of his enthusiastic counterpart. ( )

This is the story of the life of Nick Carraway before he becomes a major character in The Great Gatsby. It starts with him as a soldier in Europe at the end of World War 1. When he comes back home he ends up in New Orleans where he befriends a Madame and her ex husband. When her House of Ill Repute is burnt down it seems like her ex is responsible. As a friend to both Nick must navigate his sticky relationship with the two.. The novel is an interesting take on what happened before his later Gatsby life. Worth reading. ( )

Rating: 3.5* of five, on benightè Goodreads where there are no half-stars I rounded down because BLEAK!

Great spaces of solitude in the same house that was sometimes filled with the smiling faces of friends and family but during this blackness the house seemed to grow and the space seemed to stretch in height and spread in width and Nick was left to wonder where the voices had gone.

Sums up my overall impression of the read. Deeply bleak, in an existential way, as we somehow always knew Nick Carraway's life would be. Much of the suffering appears gratuitous, self-inflicted; I came to believe that was the author's intent.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! ( )