According to a recent survey, one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year. As a public service, we look back on all the classics you only read the Cliffs Notes for.

With Fashion Week upon us, we thought it was a good time to look back on that 11th grade English favorite, The Great Gatsby.

Nick Carraway is narrator of The Great Gatsby and he’s a lot like Brandon Walsh in the first season of 90210. Like Brandon, Nick is a stock good guy character from Minnesota who is intrigued by the loose lifestyle of the coast. In Nick’s case, it’s the East coast, specifically West Egg, Long Island. West Egg has the hot parties, but the snobs from East Egg think it’s nouveau riche.

Continuing the 90210 theme, Nick quickly meets his Dylan, Jay Gatsby. Like Dylan, Gatsby is charming and mysterious. Just as Dylan had his Brenda, Gatsby has his Daisy, who is incidentally related to Nick. The two don’t have the twin connection, but Daisy is Nick’s cousin, and his only friend when he moves to New York.

Daisy is married to this lug of a guy named Tom. Tom is old money, and the two live in East Egg. Tom is having an affair with Myrtle, who lives in the valley of ashes, which is even more ghetto than West Egg.

Daisy and Gatsby used to date back in the day. When Gatsby went abroad for WWI, Daisy promised she’d wait for him, but ended up marrying Tom. Gatsby is all heart broken, so he reinvents himself as a millionaire, changes his name from James Gatz and has all these tricked out parties in West Egg in hopes that Daisy will come. Nick eventually brings Daisy over, and Jay Gatsby is all “I love you” and Daisy all “I can’t” but inevitably, they both can.

This affair pisses Tom off, so he blows up Gatsby spot as a bootlegger to Daisy. Whatever Daisy feels for Gatsby, she’s ultimately an East Egg girl, and leaves him.

At this point, the plot gets a little 90210 post college years. There’s a car accident, Gatsby takes the fall for Daisy and eventually he is murdered. The details are irrelevant: the long of the short of it is Gatsby gives up his life for Daisy, who never really cared for him that much anyway. The Gatsby is dead and by overblown symbolism, so is the American dream. Nick describes Tom and Daisy as “careless people” which pretty much sums it up.

And here’s where the Great Gatsby diverges from 90210. After all this mayhem, Nick gives up on New York and returns to Minnesota with its good Midwestern values. But even after Jim Walsh was offered a new job in Minnesota, Brandon still wants to stay in Beverly Hills.

Extras:
• You might want to seem smart by claiming a lesser known F. Scott Fitzgerald book is better than The Great Gatsby. You’ll come out seeming stupid because this is really Fitzgerald at his best.