#BookReview Nick by Michael Farris Smith @noexitpress

About the Book

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak and yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)           Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 25th February 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

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My Review

The year 2021 marks the 125th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, coming out of copyright in the USA. Nick is described by the publishers as Michael Farris Smith’s attempt to pull Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, ‘out of the shadows and into the spotlight’.

In his foreword to Nick, Farris Smith notes that, in The Great Gatsby, Nick provides very little information about himself. Essentially, the reader knows only that he fought in the Great War, he was from the Midwest and that he was turning thirty years of age. Using this sparse information as a starting point, the author sets out to imagine the events that shaped the character of Nick Carraway the reader will meet in The Great Gatsby.

Of the three things mentioned above, the fact he fought in the Great War is the biggest focus of Nick. Indeed, the scenes in the trenches of the Western Front were the most compelling parts of the book for me. There is a particularly gripping episode in which Nick joins the rest of his troop on an advance over rain-soaked terrain in a forest held by German forces. Later, Nick volunteers to work in the tunnels being excavated under the enemy trenches, becoming a “listener” whose role is to detect the sound of German troops or tunnellers. In a nod to his future role as narrator of The Great Gatsby, he proves himself an exceptionally good listener.  Later in the book, whilst working for a brief time in the family hardware shop, the author has him become a good observer too, noticing the mannerisms of customers and able to predict their needs before they express them.

Although the sections set in the war were descriptively the most compelling parts of the book for me, of course there is no sense of jeopardy for Nick himself, only for others around him; we know Nick will survive to appear in The Great Gatsby. What the author can do is explore the experiences that may have shaped him. Farris Smith does so by imagining a love affair between Nick and a woman called Ella he meets while on leave in Paris, and by having Nick haunted in the years to come by traumatic wartime memories that manifest themselves in nightmares and panic attacks.

There is very little reference to Nick’s early life in the Midwest, except for some brief childhood memories of his father’s despair at Nick’s mother’s periods of depression. Rather than returning home after the war, there is a long section of the book in which Nick travels to New Orleans. The destination is chosen on a whim reflecting the restlessness at the heart of his character. There he becomes involved with Judah, a wounded veteran of the Great War. ‘And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognise it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.’  Some of the melodramatic events that follow felt a little out of character with the rest of the book for me although the atmosphere of the period is vividly recreated.

Nick is not so much a prequel to The Great Gatsby as a homage to Fitzgerald’s novel. Indeed, it’s only in the very final pages that Nick arrives at the location of the opening scenes of that book. This means readers unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby will find themselves at no disadvantage and can base their judgment of Nick solely on how successfully they feel Farris Smith has created a story about a young man who just happens to be called Nick.  For readers like myself who have read Fitzgerald’s original, it has definitely made me curious to read The Great Gatsby again and pay more attention to its narrator.

My thanks to Lisa at No Exit Press for my proof copy of Nick. You can watch a replay of the online launch of Nick during which Michael Farris Smith talked about the book with Alison Flood of The Guardian by clicking on the following link:  https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-launch-of-nick-by 

In three words: Dramatic, intriguing, assured

Try something similar: The Road To Grantchester by James Runcie

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About the Author

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and numerous others, and have been named Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

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