“His sole accomplishment,” he thinks, “had been to survive and even that seemed like an accident.” Wracked by survivor’s guilt and haunted by visions of war, Nick sits in a whorehouse bar – without drinking or going upstairs. With Prohibition on the horizon, the Big Easy is a panicked celebration of decadence. In the second half of the novel, Nick returns to the United States “sunkeyed and deranged” and decides on a whim to go to New Orleans instead of home. “The constant explosions around them and they began to separate, the living and the dead and those somewhere in between. “The rifles fired and once they were emptied the bayonets and once they were broken off in the rib cages out came the knives and the hands and knees and fists and whatever else could be used to kill,” he writes. That plan succeeded too well: he now finds himself enduring the horrors of trench warfare, which Smith describes in a style that gracefully reflects the rhythms of Fitzgerald’s prose. Against his father’s advice, Nick enlisted to get away from the dull, prescribed routines of the midwest.

Smith’s novel opens in France during the First World War. Anyone who knows The Great Gatsby will hear echoes of that book’s luxurious melancholy, as when Smith writes, “Nick sat with his memories in a way that others sat with photographs of wives or children, holding the worn edges and staring at the faces as if staring into an unanswerable question.” Smith, the author of several Southern Gothic novels, is a talented writer who approaches Fitzgerald’s work with reverence and close attention to detail.

The Great Gatsby instal the new