Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.

But Gatsby lends itself to the confusion that Fitzgerald lamented. Yes, it is unwavering in its condemnation of American excess, but even so, the whole novel pulses with an intoxicatingly rhythmic prose. Just read the first sentence aloud: “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” You can damn near tap your foot to it. Or take this one: “Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

When words roll like that, it’s hard not to enjoy the party, and for me that’s the real genius of Gatsby. The book makes you feel for the entitled spoiled disgusting rich and the poor people living in the valley of ashes, and everyone in between. You know the parties are vapid and maybe even evil, but you still want to be invited. And so in bad times, Gatsby feels like a condemnation of the American idea, and in good times it feels like a celebration of that same idea. David Denby has written that the book has “become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.”

So it has become for that sentence near the book’s end. “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

There’s just the one problem with that line, which is that it’s not true. It’s not true that “man” held his breath in the presence of this continent, because if we are imagining “man” as all of humanity, then “man” had known about, and indeed lived in, the area for tens of thousands of years. In fact, the use of “man” in the sentence ends up telling us a lot about whom, precisely, the narrator thinks of as a person, and where the narrator centers their story.

That “last time in history” also proved wrong, of course. Within a few decades of Gatsby’s publication, human beings stepped foot on the moon. Not long after that, we sent a telescope into space that allowed us to glimpse what the universe looked like just after the Big Bang.

Maybe the novel knows this. It is, after all, a book about hearkening back to a past that never existed, trying to fix some single moment from the past into permanence, when the past is neither fixed nor fixable. And so maybe the novel knows that hearkening back to these transitory enchanted moments is a doomed enterprise. Maybe the Plaza knew they were making a room about (and for) the baddies.