In his 1976 Nobel lecture, novelist Saul Bellow opined that literary critics, “when they read novels, find nothing in them but the endorsement of their own opinions.” While a given novel remains more or less the same, he suggested – in its content if not in its packaging – critical opinion mutates endlessly, reflecting the prevalent insights, ideologies, and institutional and market pressures of a succession of cultural moments. Fitzgerald scholar Edward Wasiolek concedes as much of the many readings of The Great Gatsby, stating, “We read the text … with the best and most we and our age can give” (86). In American Icon: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context, Robert Beuka surveys the reception and adaptation of perhaps the best-known American novel, but is too often at the mercy of the prescriptive readings he recounts. Like much Gatsby criticism, American Icon is also demonstrably in thrall to the tragic lyricism of the novel itself. Beuka, finally, can only confirm what Fitzgerald already tells us: that repossessing an ever-receding past is an impossibility.

American Icon begins with a familiar, if well-sourced, retelling of the novel's early obscurity. (Beuka's first chapter, on the novel's contemporary reception, provides the book's most contextually useful discussion, but admittedly avails itself of research already undertaken by Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Matthew J. Bruccoli.) Indeed, the current orthodoxy of Gatsby as “the quintessential American novel” (1) was some time in being established; the novel was published to decidedly mixed reviews in 1925. As Beuka informs us, “too many fluff pieces in the glossy magazines” had led to a “critical backlash against Fitzgerald as merely a purveyor of facile commercial fiction” (10). He casts the novel's (especially commercial) failure as befitting a hard-luck narrative in which a faddish public abandoned the author to frustration and ill health.

The terms of Fitzgerald's early reputation were, of course, established following the publication of his first and most immediately successful novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), a charming if ragged Bildungsroman fictionalizing the author's early romantic entanglements and his Princeton years. His celebrity status did him few favours with many among his initial critics, and, with “the ascent of a more proletarian strain in the national literature” (24) in the 1930s, the perceived obsolescence of his prodigals and debutantes seemed further pronounced. Gatsby fell for a time out of print. Fitzgerald persistently lobbied editor Maxwell Perkins for its reissue; the Modern Library edition, with an introduction by Fitzgerald, would not appear until 1934. This edition, intended to capitalize on what little fanfare attended the publication of Tender Is the Night, fared little better than the first.

Was Gatsby's distinction, then, intrinsic despite being initially overlooked, or was it culturally constructed in later years? Beuka attributes the novel's eventual popularity largely to the post-Depression-era “allure of 1920s style” (5), to the inexpensive paperback editions published in the 1940s, and to Gatsby's amenability to New Critical textual analysis. Another crucial factor was, of course, the romantic consecration enabled by the author's death, in 1940, at forty-four. By reissuing the novel, with the fragment The Last Tycoon, in 1941, Scribner's, at least, demonstrated an awareness of the cultural appetite for narratives of youthful death – in this case, both Fitzgerald's and Gatsby's. By the mid-1950s, Gatsby was firmly established as “a central document in American literature” (47). It currently “sells some 400,000 copies annually” (126).

American Icon's focus is, despite the suggestion of its subtitle, upon trends in literary criticism and scholarship making reference to The Great Gatsby. Beuka's readings of the critics are undertaken in a tone of occasionally defensive appreciation; he asserts the novel's greatness in terms borrowed from Gatsby itself, describing it as “the book that ought to have been commensurate to [Fitzgerald's] critics’ capacity for wonder” (13). American Icon is, unfortunately, indebted for most of its insights to the critics Beuka quotes; it is not until well into the book's fifth and final chapter that he provides his own reading of the novel as “portraying the anxiety that inheres to place-bound experience in an increasingly metropolitan and rootless age” (127).

Beuka's second, and less diligently undertaken, objective is to trace Gatsby's absorption by the mainstream of American culture – but, on the evidence, he seems reluctant to credit material in this category as being worthy of Fitzgerald's masterpiece. For example, only the third film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, along with its marketing campaign, is addressed in any kind of detail, and then is mostly derided. Beuka evidently shares in Fitzgerald's valorization of literature relative to film.

Indeed, during three separate residencies (1927, 1931, and 1937–40), Fitzgerald unhappily attempted to write for Hollywood. In his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” he reflected that the threat of literary obsolescence posed by “the talkies” was a source of “rankling indignity.” Beuka's misgivings, though less self-serving, are no less reactionary. In identifying in the novel a quality untranslatable to film, he tends towards unctuous mysticism, determining only that “the visual medium of film is not particularly well suited to Fitzgerald's work, the pleasure and power of which derive from his haunting use of language, his unique romantic lyricism” (87).

American Icon concludes with a catalogue of the novel's (mostly inferior) recent adaptations on stage and screen; a more incisive cultural study might trace the more subtle resonance of Gatsby in American visual storytelling – for example, in the revelation, in the AMC series Mad Men, of Donald Draper's sordid self-invention en route to joining New York's moneyed class; or in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, a series concerned, like The Great Gatsby, with the ill-gotten wealth of the early 1920s. The novel's popularity in other contexts than the American one might also be more fully considered. Beuka's critical scope is, finally, delimited by the American national mythology that, he acknowledges, has overwhelmed other avenues of inquiry into the novel. The book's primary failing, however, may be that its title misrepresents the text: “American Icon” implies an interest in the book as image or, at least, as object. Surprisingly, Beuka's notion of the novel as a “cultural icon” (2) is not corroborated with a sustained consideration of its visual, editorial, and material evolution. This is a utilitarian survey of Gatsby criticism that nods only in passing at the novel's broader absorption into American narrative and visual culture.