(West) Egg on our Face (books)

My 9-year old has gmail.
‘We’ve all had gmail accounts set up at school,’ he announced the other day.
‘Oh!’ I remarked in surprise, unprepared – as usual – for how quickly time seems to have flown.
‘Email?’ I mused later to his father, ‘but he’s still a baby.’
‘No,’ his father replied matter-of-factly, ‘he’s not.’
I spent few sleepless hours on the back of that, but then when I woke in the morning, I had virtually forgotten about this business of my eldest born not being a baby. And yes, also the gmail business.
A few hours and multiple cups of coffee later, I found myself at my computer pottering around with words – as one does – and doing on that morning, I must confess, a particularly tasteless job of it, when I heard the familiar irresistible ping of a new message.
‘whats up mum’ it said. Just like that.
And just like that, I was filled with renewed fear.
Not because of the message itself, not exactly, but because of what it meant and could mean and would mean. Because it was true. Too true. My 9-year old son had plunged – already? – into the grammarless world of the internet.
And from here, there would be no turning back.
After this, the progression would be easy. I could already see it unfolding in my head. Email to text, text to whatsapp, whatsapp to (shudder) facebook. Just like that. ‘whats up mum.’ No question mark needed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Great Gatsby’ in 1925 to mixed reviews and shoddy sales. The book reportedly sold a paltry 20,000 copies in its first year. When he died in 1940, Fitzgerald believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. Those three little words. Out of print. The worst kind of fate to befall a novelist.

Facebook or ‘TheFacebook,’ as it was originally called, the definite article itself providing a sinister warning of everything to come, was launched in 2004, opened to the public in 2006, and had 50 million subscribers by October 2007.

Reclaimed and rejuvenated in the years following Fitzgerald’s death, ‘Gatsby’ came back with a vengeance, establishing itself quickly as a literary masterpiece, an essential part of high school and college English classes, and even more canonically, entering on a to-stay basis, the much-coveted coterie of ‘Great American Novel,’ right up there with ‘Huck Finn’ and ‘The Catcher in The Rye.’ Today, it has purportedly sold over 25 million copies with an additional 500,000 being sold annually. Not too shabby, all things considered.

Facebook didn’t need a ‘come back.’ Turns out, it never went away. The site currently has 2.45 billion users.

‘And I like large parties,’ wrote F. Scott, ‘They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’

The first time I read Fitzgerald was in an aptly named ‘Great American Novels’ course for my English Lit. degree. I signed up for the course not because of any particular affinity for Fitzgerald or for that matter, for any of the ‘Great American Novels.’ It just so happened that my 18-year old heart was, at that particular moment in time, completely captured by a certain professor whose speciality included, among other areas of expertise, the Great American Novel.
Said professor was young and serious-eyed with a head full of ideas and also of tawny curls, which I am fairly sure never got washed and when he showed up to class one day in his delightfully scruffy clothes which also I am fairly sure never got washed and he asked us to turn to Chapter 1, Page 1 of The Great Gatsby in his earnest north-eastern twang, he had me, pretty much, at hello. And so I sat in middle-most seat of the front-most row for the entire semester imagining the professor, in his ivy-league student days, marching for human rights or women’s rights – amazing how those are two separate things – or other such worthy cause, while he discoursed, with an almost Christian zeal, upon the ins and outs of the modern American canon.

To cut a long story, and much of the associated melodrama, short, the only enduring thing to come of all of this was that nine novels later, my capricious heart fell out of love with the professor and in love – deeply, passionately and till death do us part –with F. Sure, he had a dubious career and a terrible drinking habit and died at about the same age that I am now, (give or take), but his extraordinary ability to isolate and shine a(n uncomfortable) light on the aspirational (and totally dysfunctional) impulses of the human psyche, combined with the extreme lyricism and romanticism of his prose style got me at an age when I was needing to be got.

Don’t take my word for it. Open Gatsby. Read aloud. Preferably in an earnest north-eastern accent if you can manage it.
Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1:
‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.’
Woah, I thought then (and think still). This shit’s got a beat and I can boogie with it. And that, if you really want to know, is how it’s done.
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say,” F. wrote.
Well Scottie, I guess we got nothing much to say these days.
We simply don’t write like that anymore.

The other day, I happened to chance upon a Facebook post of someone who had uploaded a picture of themselves sitting in a first-class cabin of a plane with their shoes off and their feet up, reading a book while holding a filled champagne flute. I stopped and lingered a while.

The next day I deliberately visited the same person’s page to see a new picture up, this time with the powdery slopes of some fabulous looking ski resort forming the backdrop to a close- up of her eating a nine-course meal. I know because she posted a picture of each course (in sequence), but I don’t know what’s worse – that she posted or that I counted.

Later I wondered, in the eventuality of us ever meeting, if this person would say to me – verbally, replete with eye contact and everything else that comes with non-virtual communication – something along the lines of, ‘Hey, so just wanted to share how the other day, I flew first class and read Murakami while sipping some excellent Veuve Clicquot…and then I went to Aspen and ate a nine-course meal. Here, let me describe each course (in sequence)…’
Which she then proceeds to do.
And then, waits patiently for days for me to put my thumb up.
Why do we post what we would never say?
And – more importantly – why does the other person, meaning the reader, meaning the consumer, meaning in this case, me, even care?
This wasn’t a friend. This wasn’t even a friend of a friend. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure how she got on my Facebook or how I got on hers or if that’s even the same thing. I don’t remember adding her. Or her adding me. Or – terrifyingly – did someone else, unknown and unrelated, do the adding on our behalf? In any case, the point is, this was not someone I thought about daily. Or occasionally. Or ever.
And yet, the second time around, I stopped by her post deliberately, drawn in by some inexplicable voyeuristic curiosity. I lingered. I entertained myself at her expense. I drank her delicious illicit alcohol.
I was – and I say this with some horror – a Fitzgeraldian partier.

And – gasp – just like that person, I didn’t know whose party I was in. Martinis, debauchery, live orchestras under the stars.
5000 friends, 10,000 comments, 20,000 likes.
‘We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…’ Waiting for Daisy to come.

What, you have to ask, is the real tragedy of The Great Gatsby? What is the real tragedy of this brave new Facebook world? Or as F. would say in his magnificent only-to-be- aspired-to language, ‘What foul dust floats in the wake of our dreams?’

Which other ‘movement’ in the history of humankind has involved this kind of global followership without a period of discussion or argument, without trial, without dogma, without thought? A movement – no, an entire existence, in which we friend and unfriend and follow and unfollow and like and unlike with reckless abandon, according to the mood of the moment. Today we have 500 friends, tomorrow 495 or if we are lucky, maybe 512. But frankly, it doesn’t matter to us, nothing does. We plough on with our posts and our pictures, our planes and our champagne, our ski resorts and our perfectly perfect teeth – all in the hope of buying love.
Like the idle rich or the careless.
The green light of Gatsby at the dock of Daisy’s home or the blue light of Facebook on our computer screens both beckon, equally enticing, equally unworthy.
Fantasies both, yet impossible to resist. We have always used fiction to conceal the anguish in our lives.
You don’t even have to be rich anymore. Only idle. Who even survives this novel?

I replied to my son’s email. ‘Nothing much,’ I wrote, ‘You?’

And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I finished with, ‘I love you.’ He replied straight away. ‘Hey mum. Arsenal manager got sacked.’ Phew, I thought with some relief, that’s good.
‘It was nice to get your email,’ I said casually at dinner. One course only by the way. Plus, ice-cream. If there was anything left over in the tub, that is. Two courses then. But I’m still not taking any pictures.
‘Was it?’ he said, his beautiful face all lit up, ‘I’ll email you again tomorrow during break.’
‘Tomorrow’s email’ never came and a small part of me had to confess to feeling that foolish and slightly disappointing twinge of unmet expectations.
I mentioned it at dinner that evening, keeping the whole vibe super chill and extremely deliberately nonchalant.
‘Hey, so I was looking forward your email,’ I said airily, ‘what happened?’
‘Oh,’ he exclaimed. ‘Sorry, but the thing is that I ran out of time. So-and-so-classmate was sad about something, so I was trying to cheer him up and then the bell rang, and we had to go back to lessons.’
‘Why was he sad?’ the 6-year old – my second born, who is a very, very cool cat and has no interest in email or gmail or screens or tv or other people’s lives (meaning, he will never be a novelist, which fact fills me with boundless relief) – wanted to know.
‘Why was he sad?,’ the 6-year old, repeated looking up questioningly with his big brown eyes. ‘He has a pool.’
It was an interesting observation, I thought.
Especially because in the end, F. leaves Gatsby dead floating in a pool in which he never once swam.
The last royalty check Fitzgerald received from Scribner’s, his publisher, was for $13.13. The last time I checked, Zuckerberg was worth $68.2 billion.

It’s the way the world turns, old sport.
The 9-year old, who is uncorrupted (thus far) (but not for long) made the choice to spend his break time by physically engaging with an actual friend in need, rather than indulge in the infinity-number of virtual friendship possibilities of the internet, threw his kid brother a look of contempt.
‘Rich people,’ he declared seriously, ‘can also be sad.’
And F. Scott Fitzgerald turned slightly in his grave.
“Breathing dreams like air” he wrote.
He knew, you see. He always knew. And Jay Gatsby knew. And Daisy herself, she knew too. And you know.
You know, you already know… and that perhaps, is the diabolical appeal of the whole story. Everybody knows that Daisy Buchanan was never going to come.