Alison Larkin Presents: The Great Gatsby and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button recap

This volume pairs two Fitzgerald stories about desire and time. In The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway befriends Jay Gatsby, who has built a fortune and a glittering public identity to recover his former love Daisy Buchanan. Daisy will not abandon her established life with Tom. After she kills Myrtle Wilson in Gatsby's car, Gatsby takes the risk on himself; Myrtle's husband murders him, while Daisy and Tom depart untouched. Nick leaves the East disillusioned. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Benjamin is born with an old man's body and grows younger as everyone else ages. He marries Hildegarde, prospers, serves in war, and attends college, but reverse aging steadily separates him from wife, son, and adult identity. Reduced to childhood and then infancy, he loses his memories and dies in a nurse's care.

In 1922 Nick Carraway leaves the Midwest for the bond trade in New York and rents a small house in West Egg. Across the bay in older, more fashionable East Egg live his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her wealthy husband Tom. At dinner Nick meets golfer Jordan Baker and learns that Tom is taking a telephone call from his mistress. Tom later brings Nick through the bleak industrial valley where George Wilson runs a garage and introduces him to George's wife Myrtle, the woman with whom Tom is having the affair. In a Manhattan apartment Tom keeps for their meetings, Myrtle plays at a wealthier identity. The gathering turns violent when Tom strikes her after she repeatedly invokes Daisy.

Nick attends one of the lavish parties held by his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, whose guests spread extravagant rumors without recognizing their host. Gatsby proves restrained and courteous rather than flamboyant. He later asks Jordan to explain his private hope: years earlier he loved Daisy, and he bought his mansion across the bay to remain near her. His fortune and parties are parts of an effort to recover that relationship. Nick arranges a reunion at his cottage. After an awkward beginning, Gatsby and Daisy reconnect, and he shows her the house and possessions he has accumulated. The reunion gives Gatsby what his public celebrations could not, although Nick senses that no real encounter can fully equal the ideal Gatsby has preserved.

Nick learns that Gatsby was born James Gatz and deliberately invented a new identity, first attaching his ambition to a wealthy mentor and later to his ideal of Daisy. Daisy and Gatsby begin an affair, but Gatsby wants more than secrecy: he expects Daisy to say she never loved Tom and to restore their earlier relationship as though the intervening years had not occurred. Tom becomes suspicious and forces a confrontation during a trip to Manhattan. Daisy admits loving Gatsby but cannot erase her history with Tom, weakening Gatsby's imagined future. On the return journey Daisy drives Gatsby's car and strikes Myrtle Wilson, killing her, then continues without stopping. Myrtle's husband George is left distraught, while Gatsby waits outside the Buchanan house to protect Daisy and is prepared to claim responsibility for the car.

Gatsby tells Nick about his early love for Daisy and continues waiting for her even though she has withdrawn into her life with Tom. Tom tells the grieving George Wilson enough to identify Gatsby as the owner of the car. George travels to Gatsby's mansion, shoots him in his pool, and then kills himself. Nick tries to gather Gatsby's associates for the funeral, but the crowds who used his hospitality disappear; only a few people attend, including Gatsby's father. Daisy and Tom leave without offering help or acknowledging their part in the deaths. Repelled by their carelessness and by his experience of the East, Nick ends his relationship with Jordan and returns to the Midwest, reflecting on Gatsby's capacity for hope and its collision with an unrecoverable past.

The Great Gatsby has ended with Gatsby murdered, Daisy and Tom gone, and Nick returning west. The second story begins in Baltimore in 1860. Roger Button arrives at a hospital expecting a conventional newborn and instead finds his son Benjamin with the size, speech, and appearance of a seventy-year-old man. Roger refuses to accept what he sees and forces Benjamin into infant clothes and nursery routines. Benjamin attempts to satisfy his father, though he prefers adult food, quiet company, and his grandfather's cigars. As years pass, his family notices that he is not aging normally: his elderly appearance is gradually becoming younger.

Benjamin's reverse aging makes ordinary institutions misread him. Yale rejects him when officials see an apparent middle-aged man claiming to be an eighteen-year-old applicant. As his body approaches the age expected of a young adult, he enters his father's business and proves effective. He meets Hildegarde Moncrief, who is attracted to what she believes is his mature age and bearing. Benjamin does not explain the direction of his aging, and they marry despite public curiosity about their apparent difference in years. For a time his unusual condition aligns with adult expectations, allowing him social standing, marriage, and useful work.

Benjamin continues to become younger while Hildegarde ages in the usual direction. He serves with distinction in the Spanish-American War and returns outwardly more youthful, while his attraction to his wife diminishes as their apparent ages diverge. Their son Roscoe grows into adulthood and takes over the family business. Benjamin finally looks young enough to attend Harvard, where he excels in football and enjoys the success Yale once denied him. But his regression does not stop at an ideal age. His strength and academic ability fade as he becomes adolescent, and Roscoe increasingly treats his father's condition as a source of embarrassment rather than a fact Benjamin can control.

After college Benjamin grows through boyhood in reverse, losing access to adult independence and memory. Roscoe insists that he behave according to his apparent age and eventually sends him to kindergarten. As Benjamin becomes smaller, a nurse assumes responsibility for him. The adult life of business, marriage, war, and education recedes until it no longer has meaning for him. He passes into infancy, aware only of immediate comforts and discomforts, then loses even those distinctions. The combined volume ends as Benjamin's senses and consciousness fade completely, his extraordinary life erased from his own mind at the moment of death.

In The Great Gatsby, Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby's car, and Gatsby protects Daisy by allowing suspicion to fall on him. Tom directs the grieving George Wilson toward Gatsby; George shoots Gatsby and then himself. Daisy and Tom leave without accepting responsibility, almost no party guests attend Gatsby's funeral, and Nick returns to the Midwest after recognizing the destructiveness beneath their wealth. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Benjamin continues growing physically younger while his wife and son age normally. His achievements and adult relationships fall away as he passes through adolescence and childhood. Roscoe, embarrassed by him, eventually places him in kindergarten and leaves him in a nurse's care. Benjamin's memories and awareness contract with his body until sensation itself fades, and he dies as an infant with no remaining knowledge of the long reverse life he has lived.