Author's Note

A Note to the Reader

Saint Nick is a novel about a man finding his way back to the world after the events of a summer closed it off for him.

The man is Nick Carraway. The summer was 1922. What happened that summer — and what it cost him, and what it gave back, and how he eventually found the words for it — is what this novel is about.

You do not need to have read The Great Gatsby to read Saint Nick. Nick is fully himself on these pages — funny, perceptive, constitutionally evasive, capable of genuine warmth and genuine self-deception simultaneously. The world he inhabits is richly and specifically rendered: St. Paul, Minnesota in the early 1920s, with its limestone bluffs and its wholesale hardware businesses and its New Year's Eve parties in forty-two room mansions and its University Club.

The characters who populate this world — Pearl who steals every scene she enters, Edith who sees through Nick with the precision of someone inspecting a used automobile, Dexter whose warmth conceals something older and harder, Anne whose grievances are entirely legitimate and entirely ignored — are complete human beings who require no outside context to be vivid and true.

If you come to Saint Nick without Gatsby, you will find a novel that is intelligent, comic, morally serious, and emotionally honest about what it means to be a person who perceives clearly and acts poorly. About the gap between the principle you have adopted as your North Star and the life you actually live. About the dream that was always going to destroy itself and what you build in the ruins.

That is a complete and satisfying reading experience. Saint Nick does not withhold its pleasures from readers who arrive without prior knowledge of anything.

If you have read The Great Gatsby — if you have carried it for years, if you have felt the pull of certain sentences — then Saint Nick will do something to you that goes beyond pleasure.

It will change how you read Gatsby.

Not by explaining it. Not by supplementing it. But by giving you the world that Gatsby has always been encoding beneath its surface — the world Nick knew when he wrote it, the knowledge that presses through in certain places where the surface and the substrate refuse to perfectly align.

Saint Nick is the recollection that produced The Great Gatsby. Read it and you will understand what Nick knew when he wrote that novel — and what he chose not to say.

You will return to Gatsby and find it richer, stranger, more morally complex, and more emotionally honest than you found it before.

Either way — Gatsby or no Gatsby, first time or fifteenth — Saint Nick is written for you. And for those who have not yet read The Great Gatsby, I hope this novel will make you want to. The only requirement is a willingness to sit with a narrator who sees everything clearly and cannot quite bring himself to say what he sees. Between the seeing and the saying is where this novel lives.

-A.S. Lorde