*Updated 7/20* Under the Red White and Blue+ reviews roundup

A Deep Dive Into the Stubborn Myth of Gatsby
Allen Barra, The National Book Review: “Under the Red White and Blue is about everything they left out of The Great Gatsby when you studied it in school. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel resonates like no other American fiction of the twentieth century, ‘for generations exerting a gravitational pull so insistent that it can seem to have colonized the imagination both of its own country and of people imagining that country from somewhere else.’”

Gatsbys of Our Time: On Fitzgerald’s novel and eternal American myths
Matt Hanson, The Baffler: “Marcus suggests that the founding phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ must be constantly redefined because it is self-evidently difficult, if not impossible, to actually live by, given the massive contradictions of American life. What resonates today, with the perpetual tectonic shifts of the economy, is how the lofty egalitarian ideal gets trampled over by the necessary hustle of trying to survive in a market economy. The average person is too busy scrambling to put food on the table to pursue much of anything, let alone happiness…”

Why The Great Gatsby’s Tragic Catastrophe Feels so Contemporary
Kelly Scott Franklin, National Review: “Those who manage to follow the scattershot content of this cultural study will likely founder in its tangled prose. In one long sentence, Marcus delays his main verb to the 215th word, leaving poor old Strunk and White rolling in their graves…”
GM: “I read Strunk and White in high school and wasn’t impressed. It seemed like a manual on how not to find your own voice.”

What We Can Learn From Greil Marcus, Film Critic
Jason Bailey, in Crooked Marquee, touches on all three releases: “Every writer has a book that changes them—a particular volume that hits you like a thunderbolt, magnifying with crystal clarity what the best prose can do, and what you could only hope, on your best day, to approach. For me, that book was Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train… which I read the summer before entering graduate school in the hopes of writing about movies for a living…”

New Look at The Great Gatsby
Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle: “The Great Gatsby is sometimes described as the best novel of the past 100 years, but Greil Marcus isn’t the sort to settle on such a pat label. To him, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterwork is something more useful: the ideal framework for a discussion about this country’s conflicted soul…”