Read about another lame girlfriend on the list.Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Granted, no one we meet in Gatsby is such a prize, but Daisy is arguably the novel’s most infuriatingly self-serving characters. After she and Gatsby fall in love, she turns around and marries big dumb brute Tom Buchanan while Gatsby is serving overseas. Nice, right? Given their disastrously unhappy marriage, I couldn’t really blame Daisy for rekindling her romance with Gatsby once he showed up in the neighborhood and was all, “Oh hey again, I now happen to be a newly minted millionaire who never stopped loving you.” Less sympathetic was Daisy’s willingness to allow Gatsby to take the fall for her hit-and-run car accident that killed Tom’s mistress. And when a tragic misunderstanding resulted in Gatsby’s violent death, Daisy skipped his meager funeral to take a vacation with her husband and child. Classy!
The Great Gatsby appears among Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.
Also see: Five of the lamest boyfriends in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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