To anyone who came to maturity in the fifties the sentiment of Alfred Moulton, narrator of the first half of "The Great Dethriffe," will ring engagingly true: "without any stylish era to call my own I had become an heir to a previous generation's myth, content to keep up appearances until something grander came along." C.D.B. Bryan's point is essentially true: the legend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is more or less the subject of this novel, in many respects had more meaning to us children of the Ike Age than to those of the Jazz Age. Unhappily, the novel has not much more to offer than that premise, itself not especially original.

Check that. "The Great Dethriffe" holds some interest also as an attempt to rewrite "The Great Gatsby"; if nothing else, Mr. Bryan deserves admiration for his cheek. The rewriting attempt is indirect, of course, an effort to translate the Gatsby story into contemporary terms. Though the ambition is admirable, the result is, at the very best, merely diverting.

Mr. Bryan's Jay Gatsby is George Dethriffe, a gentlemanly young business sort whose detached exterior conceals a somewhat muted Gatsbyesque concern with image and a decidedly Gatsbyesque yearning for the Daisy Buchanan of this novel. She is Alice Townsend, an incandescently beautiful Daisy-Zelda who turns out to be a classic bitch. (p. 46)

Purely as domestic melodrama and suburban-bedroom sociology, "The Great Dethriffe" is successful. The marriage of George and Alice and its subsequent disasters are at moments quite movingly portrayed. Mr. Bryan has a sharp perception of the pressures that crack marriages, though his insistence on placing the burden of blame on the wife seems to me to be an instance of what the Women's Lib people would call sexism. Mr. Bryan writes in the St. Grottlesex Style, which is to say that he is out of Marquand by O'Hara, though as yet no competition for either. He writes well, if limply; but when he moves from quiet understatement to descriptive passion, the results can be disastrous…. He is also guilty of false touches, as in an LSD encounter that occurs in the early sixties, before people were taking LSD.

As to the Fitzgerald question, the novel's main arguments do not hold water. "I come to bury Fitzgerald," Alfred says in his section, "not to praise him." To bury the past, that is—to exorcise "an order that has ceased to have any meaning, that has ceased to contribute." Rejection of the past is, I realize, much in fashion; it is also one of the great insanities of the age, an opinion "The Great Dethriffe" does nothing to change.

As for Gatsby, it is quite true that his life was indeed, as one of Mr. Bryan's characters remarks, "the celebration of illusion." George and Alice do live an illusion, part Jay-Daisy and part Scott-Zelda, and the novel's conclusion may be read as an awakening from illusion. But Mr. Bryan evidently believes that Fitzgerald himself joined in the illusion and the celebration of it, which is an utter misreading of "The Great Gatsby." That is one of our great tragic novels, and an outcry against society not much less bitter than "U.S.A." Mr. Bryan inexplicably seems to blame Fitzgerald for Jay Gatsby's illusions—and, into the bargain, fails to understand the universality of the yearnings they represent. (pp. 46-7)