Jay Gatsby and the USSR

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

I stumble stupidly across the [Hoover] dam. It’s as gorgeous as ever, a lasting monument to America’s onetime greatness, not only an engineering marvel but a work of Art Deco so sublime that you can imagine Jay Gatsby shaking martinis on the Arizona Intake Tower. Now, if you jump from the edge, you’ll land on rocks. It feels like something from a neglected former Soviet republic.

Man in a Can, Mark Sundeen

Background

This masterpiece came from an article on Lake Mead’s rapid reduction in water level. As the lake dries up, it reveals mysteries from decades past, mostly in the form of dead bodies. The author traces the cold cases while telling the cautionary tale of rivers running dry.

What makes it wonderful?

The pictures we carry in our minds of the Hoover Dam are grandiose, magnificent, even larger than life. This is exactly how the author paints the picture in the first half of the passage.

Gorgeous as ever. An engineering marvel. A work of Art Deco so sublime you can imagine Jay Gatsby shaking martinis on the Arizona Intake Tower.

When I picture Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, with his perfectly primped hair raising a martini glass to his guests—that’s the same shimmer I picture when I think of the Hoover Dam.

But according to this author’s account, those days are gone.

It’s still a modern marvel, but where the beautiful blue water of Lake Mead used to meet the concrete wall, now there are rocks.

The water receded, leaving what Sundeen describes as something from a neglected former Soviet republic.

And I can picture those words pretty clearly too. I think of the Gulags. Or I think of a map from an old James Bond game I used to play with my friend Luke on his Nintendo 64.

Either way, the picture is vivid, and it’s a stark contrast from the raging Long Island parties thrown by The Great Gatsby.

Let's get technical

What is this dissonance we’re feeling as readers?

It’s called juxtaposition, and it happens when a writer slaps two contrasting concepts side by side. It’s a technique to tell what something is by showing what it isn’t.

In an article comparing the seedy days of Vegas to the shiny, the old beauty of Lake Mead to the new desolation, and the once abundant water to the present drought, it was a perfect passage to encompass the theme of the piece.

It was an article of opposites, and this paragraph was its apex.

Next time you’re setting a scene, try contrasting what is with what was. Evoke an old memory and nestle it next to a new reality. I think your readers will thank you.

Happy writing,

Joe