When I was grad school one of my professors pointed our attention to the plot of The Great Gatsby and laid it out on the table pretty much like this (spoiler alert!): Nick meets Gatsby, there are a couple parties, he facilitates a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy, Tom’s wife is run over, and Gatsby gets shot. End of story. As plot goes, it pretty simple. Simplistic, even. However, the book works because this thin plot is “buoyed by a meringue of language.”
From the moment when Nick walks into Tom Buchanan’s house:
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
Nothing happens here, yet the two paragraphs are absolutely alive with movement, which propels the reader forward through the book, page after page, moment after moment.
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