A young man rents a house on Long Island next door to a millionaire who throws parties for strangers and waits, every night, for one particular guest. Fitzgerald wrote the definitive American novel about money and longing in under fifty thousand words, and made his narrator complicit enough to be worth arguing with. Its reputation is deserved, which is rarer than it sounds. Fifty-eight plates from Marcus Larson to Magnus von Wright, 1842 to 1919, gather the porcelain, steamers and wildfowl of an age that mistook display for permanence.
