When he meets and falls in love with a destitute artist, he debates going AWOL and staying with his beloved, but he is Minnesota born, the son of a small-town hardware store owner and a deeply depressed mother, and he knows where his duty lies. The novel opens with Nick at a cafe in Paris on leave from the war. In previous novels, Smith has written eloquently and sometimes in excruciating detail about masculine brutality and trauma.
“Shell shock,” “battle fatigue” and PTSD were poorly understood at that time and often simply dismissed as cowardice. One of Smith’s most compelling insights is that many of the high-flying men partying through the Roaring ’20s, as depicted in Fitzgerald’s great novel, had only recently returned from the harrowing trench warfare of the First World War. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, but that is what Michael Farris Smith does in his sixth novel, Nick. It is a brave and ambitious project to write the backstory of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F.
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