The places where old memories meet new, new money meets old gods, and the beautiful mundane is interrupted by papercut magic-the places where the two stories crisscross, mash, and fight where they intersect-the novel’s own beautiful tense dance with its source material-constitute the novel’s most rewarding experiment. It is also a skillful feat of reinvention. I liked how the novel unwinds itself in its own way and in its own time, unfolding its clever complicated machinations with wicked skill how it hoards its secrets like a miser their stash of gold and reveals its answers slowly, patiently. The plot of moves forward with languid grace, dropping like petals from a blown rose. The Chosen and the Beautiful is truly a remarkable achievement of craft. Until there was no room in me for anything else. And I absolutely gnawed over it, read several passages out loud, rolled them out around my head, found out how they moved on my tongue, until it felt like I was absorbing them or they were absorbing me. Vo's prose, with its luxuriance and precise command of tone, has a meticulous quality to it, as if every word were a jewel laid out very carefully on a tray. Everything is new, and everything is familiar, all at once.īut Fitzgerald never managed writing as ravishingly beautiful as this. For those of you who read and loved the original Great Gatsby, it will be like returning to a love-worn poem that had melted away into half-remembered snatches and finding that it contained a new meaning. Nghi Vo reimagines The Great Gatsby with sensuality, queerness, and a glass-sharp beauty. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home? Certainly ugliness didn't, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. “Death doesn't come to Gatsby's,” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. And a glimmer of something else too, something sharp and treacherous beneath the smooth surface: shards from a mirror that tipped off a shelf and shattered and rivulets of molten blood and faint scratches from a single nail painted slick black. Still today, when I think back on the experience of reading it, I see freshly pressed silk slipping over skin and fingers sliding through hair and delicate cords of bright pearls shimmering on bare throats like sunrise on water. Oh, this book built such beautiful, ruinous, indelible images in my mind.
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