Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell

(Penguin, $30)

Careless People might at first strike the casual observer as “a reckless test of just how much Gatsby the reading public will swallow,” said Joanna Scutts in The Washington Post. But though it arrives a year after the hubbub surrounding the latest film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, this “rich, inventive” investigation of the precise milieu that spawned The Great Gatsby deserves an audience. “Like the jazz that defined the era, the book tells its story through digression and repetition, building up a pattern of internal references and refrains.” It returns us to Fitzgerald’s delirious 1923 summer in Great Neck, N.Y.—the parties, the mansions, the celebrity company, and the antics of his wife, Zelda. It also resurrects a double murder that may have inspired the novelist, and that dominated national headlines for months.

That latter strand proves to be “a twisty tale well worth reading,” said Moira Macdonald in The Seattle Times. In 1922, an Episcopal minister and a member of the church choir were found dead on a New Jersey farm, each shot in the back of the head and their bodies surrounded by scattered love letters they’d exchanged. The crime was never solved, though, and Churchwell “never quite proves” that Fitzgerald had the killings in mind when he put a fatal affair at the heart of his 1925 novel. The echoes are strong, though, said Lucy Scholes in TheDailyBeast.com, and Churchwell “proves herself a master mixologist” of literary analysis, period detail, and biological insight.

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She at least “knows a good story when she sees one,” said Tom Carson in The American Prospect. The real-life murder drama never does link up convincingly enough to Gatsby, but Churchwell has given us “a raft of plausible speculations on the interplay between a novelist’s mind and the hurly-burly around him.” Besides, “her writing is so spirited that you want her to be right about everything.” Careless People may not strictly adhere to fact, but then neither did Jay Gatsby, and he probably wouldn’t be America’s favorite tragic hero if he had.