The following was written by my dear friend, Paul Talbot, at my request. Enjoy!
One of my longstanding rituals is reading The Great Gatsby every year.
Naturally, our moods and our preoccupations season the flavor of our reading. In the case of Gatsby, various passages, characters and even sentences have drawn more attention than others over the years.
On my annual pilgrimage back to “that slender riotous island” in the autumn of 2020, it struck me that Tom Buchanan would be an ardent Trump supporter.
If not an archetype, he fits the bill in enough ways to make this a sure bet. Tom Buchanan’s arrogance, ostentation, infidelity and racism, his boorish and brackish behaviors don’t simply mirror Trump. They drape Tom with the essentials for an admiration of Trump that can‘t help but come home to roost at the East Egg ballot box.
I didn’t find this observation particularly deep. As insights go, it probably could have been made by many of the high school students who read Gatsby.
But what struck me about placing Tom Buchanan in the Trump camp was the impetus for this. Only two possibilities come to mind. One is that the novel so perfectly evokes our American ethos that the Tom Buchanan character is as timeless as it is repugnant.
The other is that the poison of Trump seeped through my defenses and tainted my enjoyment of the novel.
It probably doesn’t matter. Either way The Great Gatsby endures.
