NICK

A dark and often gripping story that imagines the narrator of The Great Gatsby in the years before that book began.

Nick grows up in a Minnesota “neighborhood of sidewalks and shade trees” and goes to Yale and then to war. On leave in Paris, he’s with a woman he loves for too short a time and loses her. He survives the trenches, the scuttling over no man’s land, the tunnels where a man alone listens for the sound of the enemy setting explosives. On his way home, he makes a detour to New Orleans and finds himself “privy to the secret griefs” (as he says in Gatsby) of a brothel owner and her estranged husband, a war veteran scarred by mustard gas and stifled love. Smith is a talented writer known mainly for his gritty evocations of violence, struggle, and loss in the U.S. South, such as those in Blackwood (2020). Here he creates, in the war and New Orleans, nightmarish worlds where Nick reckons with demons and maybe redemption. These are places far from the staid tension and off-stage deaths of Gatsby. Smith inevitably goes well beyond the sparse biographical details—Yale, the Midwest, the family hardware business, World War I, and bond trading—that F. Scott Fitzgerald provided for his narrator, who exists to bring other lives into view, not expose his own. The new Nick is a man fully realized, with a mind tormented by the war and by a first love that waned too fast to a fingernail moon of bitter memory. Whatever Smith had in mind when he began this project, he could have many readers wondering in some meta-anachronism how Fitzgerald’s Nick could fail to allude to any of the hell Smith puts him through.

A compelling character study and a thoroughly unconventional prequel.