Beautiful Little Fools(114) By Jillian Cantor

Catherine and her roommate, Helen, are suffragettes, fighting for women’s rights to vote, and in the end Catherine works to help abused women. Discuss Catherine’s role as an early-1920s feminist. How do her ideas both reflect and conflict with those of Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle?

Nick calls Jordan “an incurable liar.” How does that description define her character? Is Nick right about Jordan? What do you see as Jordan’s defining characteristic?

Mary Margaret tells Jordan that grief is “an endless, winding river,” a refrain that comes back throughout the novel. Discuss how this applies not only to Jordan and Mary Margaret’s relationship but also to the other characters in the novel. How does grief work as a recurring theme?

Is this novel a love story? If so, whose love story is it? Compare and contrast the romantic relationships in the novel. Consider Daisy and Jay, Daisy and Tom, Jordan and Nick, Jordan and Mary Margaret, Catherine and Jay, and Tom and Myrtle.

The title of the novel comes from the quote Daisy says in The Great Gatsby when her daughter is born: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Why is it fitting for the title of this particular book? Are any of the women in the novel beautiful little fools?

Detective Frank Charles was not a character in The Great Gatsby. Discuss the role he plays in Beautiful Little Fools. What do his chapters add to the novel? Compare and contrast his relationship with Dolores to the other romantic relationships in the novel.

Beautiful Little Fools revolves around unraveling who killed Jay Gatsby. But, in the end, there is more than one killer. Who would you consider guilty in the novel and why? Do you believe any of the characters are ultimately justified in their actions?

Reread The Great Gatsby and see how many references from the original you can spot in Beautiful Little Fools! Pay particular attention to the Plaza scene near the end of the book. How does the dialogue take on a different meaning in Beautiful Little Fools than in the original novel? Wilson said, his eyes roaming uncomfortably down my face, to my chest.

More from Jillian Cantor

An Essay

ONE OF THE EARLIEST BOOKS that made me want to become a writer was The Great Gatsby. I read it （and fell in love） for the first time in a high school English class, then again a few years later during a college class for my English major. I kept my college copy and moved it across the country with me for graduate school, where I reread it a third time for inspiration in the midst of struggling to write my own first novel in a writing seminar. In the twenty years since then, that copy has become well-worn, as it has become one of a handful of novels I find myself returning to read over and over.

What I’ve always loved about The Great Gatsby is the beautiful prose, the way the book is both literary and sizzling with the drama of affairs, murder, and the recklessness of the Roaring Twenties. I love that it’s glamorous and atmospheric, dark and eccentric all at once. I love that the characters are often unsympathetic, but there’s still a part of me that wants so much to like them. And most of all, I’m intrigued by the point of view, that Fitzgerald chose the outsider, Nick Carraway, to tell this particular story.

Point of view has always interested me most as a writer, and maybe that’s why I’ve found myself coming back to Gatsby as a reader, again and again. The way different stories unfold differently depending on who tells them is something I’ve considered often in my own work. What happens when we see familiar stories in new ways, from different perspectives? I’ve explored this question in my novels, while also thinking and writing about women’s lives and their unique perspectives, so much so that when I returned again to reread The Great Gatsby a few years ago, I found myself thinking about just one question. What are the women in the novel thinking and feeling?

Everything we know about the women in The Great Gatsby is filtered through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway, heavily influenced by his own often glowing perception of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby. But what if it wasn’t? I wondered about Daisy’s and Jordan’s stories, and not just during that sultry summer on Long Island, but also in the years leading up to it. And what about the tragic Myrtle and her briefly mentioned sister, Catherine? How different would everything look from these women’s points of view? How would they see Jay Gatsby—and that summer—differently than Nick does?