Christopher Hitchens' essay on Gatsby

Teaching Gatsby? See Christopher Hitchens' recent essay in Vanity Fair!   vnty.fr/JzSNli

It contains an argument about why it's a definitive American novel and has some great examples of old-school analysis:  

There are two key words in the book. They are “pointless” (and its analogues) and “careless.” They recur with striking and mounting emphasis as the narrative shakes off its near-permanent hangover. A dog biscuit at Tom Buchanan’s adulterous and nasty gathering is represented as “decomposed apathetically” in a saucer of milk; Myrtle on the same horrid occasion “looked at me and laughed pointlessly.” At Gatsby’s bigger but even hollower party, there’s a cocktail table—“the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.” After “a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour,” Jordan Baker wants to leave. In New York one hot evening, Nick notices “young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Driving through Central Park, Gatsby “came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” Is there a line more expressive of vicious tedium than Daisy’s petulant demand: “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” If there is, it’s the earlier pettishness when she insists on knowing whatever it is that people do when they make plans. Even the great cars are bored and affectless: “The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.” When Tom talks about getting gas, “a pause followed this apparently pointless remark”; when the stop for gas is made, the expression on Myrtle’s face at first seems “purposeless and inexplicable.” In West Egg, Daisy dreads “the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.” As Nick takes his penultimate leave of Gatsby, he quits him “standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.” Here is the full-out horror of torpor and morbidity and futility and waste, saturated in joyless heat and sweat. Gatsby came out in April of that year of grace 1925: the cruelest month seems right.