A Great Gatsby for the 21st century. A novel of the Jazz Age, The Big Town is the story of a failed businessman whose dreams of prosperity hinge on the secret proposition of a millionaire industrialist and a dangerous relationship he finds with a poor orphan girl chasing love in the great American metropolis. Harry Hennesey’s hopes of success, both in his household and the world, have driven him to sell his home in an Illinois small town and take his chances in the big city. He rents a room in a run-down hotel. He deals in wholesale items scavenged from yard sales and close-outs. One night at a movie theater downtown, he meets a teenage flapper named Pearl who latches onto him and won’t let go. For several years now, Harry has threatened his marriage and self-esteem with innumerable infidelities. Now he finds himself falling in love with a girl less than half his age. But that’s not all. Charles A. Follette, chairman of the board of the American Prometheus Corporation, comes to him with a slick proposition: find Follette’s missing niece, and the road to riches shall be his. Soon, though, Harry discovers a darker secret to the identity of the missing niece and what lies behind the urgency for her detection. It’s this revelation that leads him to a closer examination of what it means to the life he’s known since the birth of his children and that life he believes awaits him if he can only reach the top of the ladder. Harry’s story in The Big Town is set against a fantastic backdrop of an archetypal 1920s American big city. We see speakeasies, sanitariums, skyscrapers, and a glittering Gatsby-like party high atop the metropolis. Lost in his own moral confusions, we watch Harry try to reform his young lover and uncover the secret of her own past in a small canal town miles beyond a city where gangsters murder ordinary citizens and everyone seems to have a get-rich scheme as the Roaring ’20s come to a thunderous close. The Big Town evokes a lost era through language and flamboyant characters reminiscent of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, etc. Yet it’s also eerily relevant to our own time with its study of the role of business, crime, morality, and love in our lives.

1920年代の狂騒を21世紀の感性で再定義した本作は、フィッツジェラルドを彷彿とさせる優雅さと鋭い社会批判を併せ持つ傑作です。モンテ・シュルツは、虚飾と欲望が渦巻く大都会を舞台に、繁栄という幻影を追う人々の熱狂とその裏に潜む道徳的腐敗を、息を呑むほど美しい筆致で鮮烈に描き出しました。 主人公ハリーが抱く富への渇望と、愛と倫理の間で揺れ動く葛藤は、時代を超えて読者の魂を激しく揺さぶります。栄光の階段を上る代償として何を差し出すのか。現代にも通じるこの重厚なテーマは、失われた時代の叙事詩でありながら、今を生きる私たちの鏡となる至高の一冊です。