From there, she extrapolates from the source material by tweaking a few details (such as Jordan’s ethnicity), exploring new angles (such as the lives of queer people and people of color in twentieth-century America), and making canon implied details (such as Nick’s sexuality). In this, Vo stays true to Fitzgerald’s classic. He and Jordan become entangled in the former lovers’ story, even as they themselves become lovers. Seeking to reunite with his lost love, Daisy Buchanan (once Daisy Fay), Jay Gatsby reinvents himself as a wealthy socialite. While Jordan takes over as the narrator, the story’s guise is otherwise familiar. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, Vo reinvents the Great American Novel by giving voice to the silenced and the oppressed, and peeling back the gilded layers of history to reveal the unbearable loneliness concealed beneath the glimmering varnish. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, her debut novel and magical retelling of F. Yet, while it explores the consequences of class and money, it neglects to give voice to marginalized persons-persons like Nghi Vo’s reimagined Jordan Baker, who is queer, adopted, and Vietnamese. The Jazz Age classic, with its themes of American optimism and disillusionment, has captured the popular imagination since its publication. The Great Gatsby (1925) has been described as the quintessential American novel.
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