Is it fair to say that a major theme in The Great Gatsby is the decadence of rich people? If so, I don't understand why so many people seem to like the book, non-ironically, for the parties and the glamour. Am I missing something?
Take this excerpt for instance: "We were at a particularly tipsy table. Gatsby had been called to the phone and I'd enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now."
Tell me you haven't had this feeling about someone. The party scenes are relatable to people in all levels of wealth.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtext
Lots of people aren't, so it's not uncommon to see people whose appreciation of some works never gets beyond the surface level.
And sometimes they're so inattentive that even the text itself is lost on them. My standard example of that is Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the USA," which is widely understood (in America, anyway) as a bombastic, "we're number one!" patriotic anthem, played at political rallies and sports events and the like. If you pay attention to the actual lyrics (http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/bruce-springsteen-lyrics/born-...), however, it's clearly a song about how the American system screws the little guy. But most people don't listen beyond the upbeat, poppy chorus, so they miss Springsteen's entire point.
Personally, I've soured on the idea of being ironic in songs. Most people will miss the irony, they only listen to the catchy chorus, and more often than not, the lines you meant as absurd will be proudly paraded by the same people you were mocking. Take the recent "We the people" by A Tribe Called Quest: the chorus, taken alone, is a bigots' anthem on a catchy tune; I bet it will soon become a mainstay at neonazi rallies and the likes.
Anyway, the singer mentioned they had once been approached by a number of obvious neo-nazis after a gig, and he pretty much thought this was it - they were in for a serious beating at best.
Much surprise arose as shoulder-slapping and bear hugs ensued. "Awww, we love that Nigger song of yours, it is amazing the way you get away with it!" (Muted thanks and head for the tour bus. Double haste.)
[0] http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo1869230...
You can cite centuries old examples of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle#Early_versions
>Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War, apparently written c. 1755 by British Army surgeon Dr. Richard Shuckburgh while campaigning in upper New York.[13] The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap.[1]
* 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.
You're not missing anything. Reading a book and understanding it are two very different things.