In the main hall was a mahogany bar stretching longer than a Ziegfeld Follies kick line, and guests crowded around four and five deep before the brass rail for a taste of…well, what was your pleasure? Once I got a tiny scarlet glass filled with something murky white that tasted of cardamom, poppy seed, and honey, the last wine Cleopatra drank before her date with the asp, and Paul Townsend of the Boston Townsends got stinking drunk on something from the nomadic party of great Ubar. The lights may have been money, but there was no lack of magic either.
The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom, June 2021)Ī skilled storyteller, even with a tale as established in the public consciousness as this one, Vo’s descriptions of the fashions, drinks, and interiors of the early 1920s are thoroughly researched and pop out on the page, particularly when it comes to Gatsby’s parties. I could not leave you, I could not bear it.” “You were my very favorite,” she told me in my earliest memories.
Unlike most, she could leave, and when she did, she took me with her all the way back to her home on Willow Street. She had the tensile strength of spun steel, hard enough to bear her parents’ fury when she converted, sharp enough to make her way to the exotic shores she had always dreamed of, and she didn’t return to Louisville until the French and Chinese made living in Tonkin a misery.
While there, she came into contact with a baby whom she named Jordan. Before she passed away when Jordan was still a young girl, her adopted mother, Eliza Baker, left Louisville as a young woman to do missionary work in Vietnam. Jordan’s journey however started in Tonkin. Jordan and Daisy are childhood friends from Louisville and both end up on Long Island and Manhattan, Daisy after her marriage to Tom Buchanan and Jordan to live with an elderly aunt. This rewrite shakes up the homogeneity of the story yet stays true (in its way) to the Fitzgerald original. Nghi Vo’s reworking of the iconic The Great Gatsby in her debut, The Chosen and the Beautiful, boldly inserts Jordan Baker, a bisexual Vietnamese adoptee, into the original story with the original characters (something only really possible since the beginning of this year when the copyright of Fitzgerald’s novel ran out it’s now in the public domain). There’s something perpetually alluring about the Jazz Age.
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