Like many wonderful classics, The Great Gatsby, has not always been well received by all, but for some it has left its mark. 2021 saw the end of the copyright on The Great Gatsby, an iconic twentieth century American novel which was first published in 1925. However, until this year he was unable to publish such a work. Michael Farris Smith who is a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right and probably best known for his debut novel, The Hands of Strangers, has been working on this project for some time now. This isn’t a long lost story by the well-known writer however, but a prequel written by an author fascinated with the character. In style and theme, this Nick will remind readers of another Nick: the character Nick Adams of Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories.Nick Carraway for anyone that has not read and or the movie is the narrator of The Great Gatsby by F. This is just an outline of a deeper investigation of war and its consequences. Instead he travels to New Orleans and winds up in the city’s notorious red-light district, where a bond with a fellow scarred soldier offers enough redemption for Nick to return home to recover, then travel on to East Egg and his meeting with Gatsby. He is among the last soldiers to return to America, clearly traumatized and unable to go back to Minnesota. His return to the trenches is vividly depicted: Smith’s descriptions of warfare are cinematic, chilling and unforgettable.Īt war’s end, Nick searches Paris for his love but is unable to find her. 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.

Michael farris smith nick