I think there are at least three or four things that keep Gatsby compelling: * The prose style keeps a consistent balance of fluid/grounded and imaginative the

I think there are at least three or four things that keep Gatsby compelling: * The prose style keeps a consistent balance of fluid/grounded and imaginative the whole way through. It's nowhere near as "sticky" as other literary novels, which can force you to grind down on each sentence to get at the meaning. * The storytelling, at its surface, relates to self-absorbed goals that people connect with as fans automatically. When people are fans of something, that's basically down to them liking the characters, setting, and specific scenes or scenarios, not the hard details of the plotting or any subtextual stuff. "Everyone is here to indulge their kink" applies to pretty much any media, and here the kink is clearly "the American Dream as ostentatious wealth". If the novel were focused on Jay Gatsby's hard-striving bootlegging days, or if it concluded with a sudden turn to frugality and Puritan ethics, it would never be as popular. * The aspects of the book that are ordinary and humanizing of the characters act to make them even more relatable than a book that tried to make them worthy of their wealth. Gatsby's version of the American Dream, besides involving a very performative version of wealth, contains a mythologized, Icarus-like aspiration to ever greater ambitions. Nick Carraway is there primarily as an observer of events, and only occasionally a participant, and in fact gradually withdraws from his own aspirations over the course of the book - making him a great self-insert for the middle-class reader who would like to believe themselves better than the rich, while simultaneously indulging in the luxury aesthetics.