It's 1925, not 1920.

Whoever entered this into the catalogue has it down as 1920. Nineteen twenty! It is April 1925, and the five-year gap matters rather a lot for a novel about the specific texture of a specific summer. I'd let it go if the book were less exact. Fitzgerald put the Fuller-McGee case, the Rosenthal murder, the 1919 World Series and the arriviste architecture of Great Neck into a very short novel on purpose. Getting the year wrong is like misdating a diary.

Right. The book.

I resisted it for years on the grounds that it is over-taught, which is a stupid reason to resist anything, and one I recognise in students who arrive having done it at A-level and roll their eyes at the green light. The green light is not the problem. The problem is that it gets taught as a symbol hunt, when the novel is not primarily a symbolic construction at all. It is a piece of voice.

Nick is the whole apparatus. He announces on the first page that he is inclined to reserve all judgements and then judges everybody continuously from that sentence to the last, and the gap between his self-description and his behaviour is where the novel actually lives. He tells you he is one of the few honest people he has ever known. He is not honest. He is complicit, snobbish about Jordan's driving and not about Tom's politics, and in love with Gatsby in a way the prose keeps almost saying and then not saying.

The sentences are why this is an eight rather than the six I'd give the plot. The last page is deservedly famous, but the better writing sits in smaller places: the guests arriving and dispersing like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars, the valley of ashes, Daisy's voice being full of money, which is Gatsby's observation rather than Nick's and is the most economical piece of characterisation in the book.

Where it loses me. Myrtle and Wilson are types rather than people, and the novel's contempt for them carries a class edge it never turns back on itself the way it turns on Tom. Tom's racial theorising in chapter 1 is handled with beautiful contempt; the Wilsons are given no such care. And Gatsby's parties are rendered far more vividly than Gatsby is, which some readers call a feature and I take for at least half a limitation.

Editions: any of them, honestly. This is not a textual minefield. Do avoid the ones with a film still on the cover, not from snobbery but because two of the three film versions get the tone catastrophically wrong and the image will sit in your head the whole way through.

I taught it once, entirely outside my period, covering for a colleague on leave, and it was one of the better seminars I've run, mostly because the students had opinions already and I had none, so I asked questions and they argued. Read it in an afternoon. It was built for that.