For two hours, on the afternoon of Sunday 16 August 2020, I ran a Twitter poll in response to the following question: “If an academic book doesn't contain any discernible referencing system, can it even be called an academic book?” If you search my timeline you will still see it there. You will discover that 56 percent of the 105 respondents chose the “No” option, with 21 percent going for “How the …?” and a further 13 percent going for “Aargh” – 10 percent did actually choose “Yes,” though whether any one of those is a reader of, or subscriber to, this journal it is impossible to say. I ran this poll having finished reading Greil Marcus's latest cultural study, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby, a book that takes as many liberties with its facts (for example, Marcus refers to Fitzgerald's character Wolfshiem as Wolfsheim, a basic, but glaring, error) as it does with basic academic expectations. Yale University Press is an academic publisher, and this review is for an academic journal, so I feel secure enough in highlighting the shortcomings of a title that would not be REFable under any metric.

F. Scott Fitzgerald favoured, where possible, four-word titles for his novels. Think This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night. While working on, arguably, his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, one of his main challenges was to find a suitable title and he discarded options such as “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires,” “Gold-Hatted Gatsby,” “Trimalchio,” “Trimalchio in West Egg,” and “The High-Bouncing Lover” before settling on the title that has, in ways both positive and negative, defined his career for almost a century: The Great Gatsby. These three words replaced what had been the working title just before publication: “Under the Red, White, and Blue.” The patriotic, American national overtones of that title need little explanation to readers of this journal. Moreover, if you are familiar with the novel itself, you will know that the reference is folded into chapter 4 when Jordan Baker explains some of the Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan backstory from 1917: “I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way.”Footnote ¹ Hypocritical patriarchal sexism is written into this briefest of glimpses of a nation at war with enemies both foreign (Germany) and domestic (America's women).

You would be hard pushed to find any of the above information in Marcus's book, which adapts “Under the Red, White, and Blue” as its title. That's because basically none of these facts is contained within his reading of Fitzgerald's novel. Indeed, if you are hoping to pick up Under the Red White and Blue in the hope of learning more about the novel, then you are going to be greatly disappointed. If, instead, you are looking for a freewheeling sojourn in the world of free association where a constellation of Gatsby adaptations and maybe-Gatsby references rub shoulders with, among others, Tupac, Elvis, James Dean, Dean Martin, Obama, and the former resident (at time of writing) of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then you're in luck. The result, in my opinion, can only be termed academic Trumpism: arbitrary assertions and associations are made with no recourse to accuracy or any sense of a sustained system of academic rigour. To take one example, Marcus is incorrect to characterize Fitzgerald's “bitter dismissal” (3) of the movies (in “The Crack-Up” essays for Esquire in 1936) as the author's only point of view on what Hollywood had to offer. Fitzgerald was a much more astute reader of social and cultural movements than critics, including Marcus, have until only very recently realized. Indeed, Fitzgerald had been courting the movie industry from the early 1920s and, as the work of actual Fitzgerald scholar Martina Mastandrea has recently shown, there is no reason any longer, for example, simply to “conjecture” (3), as Marcus does, what the first film version of Gatsby was like: Mastandrea has provided extensive evidence, via the use of storyboard stills from the movie, of what that silent version, directed by Herbert Brenon, offered the cinema-going public a year after the publication of the novel. This is one instance where Marcus's scholarship on the subject is found wholly wanting. Not one single Fitzgerald scholar or Gatsby expert is referenced in this book. Not one single article, for that matter, from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (the go-to academic home of Fitzgerald studies since 2002) merits mention in Marcus's rambling cultural studies reading of Gatsby, or is it Gatsbys? – one is never quite sure – such that one wonders quite what the point of this book was in the first place.