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Hot take on 'The Great Gatsby' being overrated in our book club

I keep hearing folks in our group call Gatsby a perfect novel, but I think the pacing is a mess. The whole party scene at Gatsby's mansion goes on for way too long before anything real happens, and I counted like 20 pages of just descriptions. Anyone else feel like Fitzgerald leaned too hard on the imagery and forgot to move the plot forward?
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2 Comments
rileynelson
20 pages of description? That's an exaggeration, the party starts on page 39.
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sandra_anderson2
Well that's still a lot of buildup. @rileynelson, does all that lead-in actually matter to the story or is it just padding?
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