But there’s more emptiness and fakery around than just Gatsby. When Nick Carraway commends a “corky but rather impressive claret” – it could hardly be both – or saying in a semi-literate way “the caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo”, we hear someone else trying to put on a bit of a worldly act. There is something gorgeous but empty about much of the lyrical rhetoric – “Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine” – and even the epigraph to the novel is not quite what it seems. Fitzgerald had trouble with the title, trifling with Trimalchio in West Egg and Under the Red White and Blue. All of them were borrowed from someone else, whether Petronius, Fitzgerald’s cousin Francis Scott Key, who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, or, in the case of the final title, from Alain-Fournier, the author of Le Grand Meaulnes. The whole novel, as well as its world, has something second-hand and vacant about it.