It might be intersting to note how come all the examples of the Great American Novel are not current. What are we not doing? what are we failing to tell? or to teach? or to learn for that matter... the 'American' experience is not restrained to the territory, for we can all have our OWN Great Novel.
While the Great American novel is obviously a game with no winner, Roth's Great American Novel does touch all the points that the GAN would need to touch and is also funnier than some of the books mentioned before. If such a thing were possible, Roth's satire of the great American novel may be about as close as we can get.
Either that or Bellefleur which is epic and has the added advantage of having been written by the Great American Novelist.
Either that or Bellefleur which is epic and has the added advantage of having been written by the Great American Novelist.
I teach this in a 19th C. American lit college class. We start with DeForest's and Buell's ideas and then test Moby Dick and Uncle Tom's Cabin against their ideas. I ask the students to come up with their own notions of what might make a novel the GAN. They write a long paper with some research about it, and the best thing is that most of them come up with better categories for what constitutes "great" and "American" and sometimes even "novel" than a lot of the critics do. Their answers are inclusive, progressive, sensitive to history, and certainly sensitive to the time and place in which the novels were written. Of course Moby Dick is the GAN, I tell them, but I hope they can convince me otherwise. They enjoy the task and they end up understanding the limits of canon creation, the desire for inclusiveness but the imperatives to exclude, and they take a greater interest in the other texts we read. It is a wonderful exercise and fun to talk and dream about, but the formal unity we seem to demand of the novel can never match the completeness of the dream Americans have had about themselves. And the reality of American experience can never be encapsulated and unified in the way the novel seems to flirt with.
It will be a welcome day when society finally dispenses with these personality cult appellations like "greatest" and "best" in regards to cultural output. People offering unique-prism perspectives on their own "favorites" would be a much more interesting and complementary collection to the state of the culture than to continue to rely on the careening and increasingly childish sense of competition. Consumer audiences are now democratized in taste by mass multi-way communication, where there were a few big markets there are now the expanding thousands of markets. A culture that illuminates itself with the light from a billion perspectives fosters more meaningful literary prosperity rather than focusing on a select few vainglorious/sponsored attempts to catch the anointment of the limelight. So you folks git on out there and seed them glowing lime trees everywhere, d'ya hear?
We're not obsessed with the Great American Novel. Look at how many bookstores have closed.
2
If I were to settle on one novelest as the Great American Novelist, I'd pick John Updike. He wrote so well of American sexual mores, the angst of the middle-class white guy, and the American communities. Consider Rabbit in all his confusion. Jonathan Franzen's novel are bitter. No, of all the authors writing today Jonathan Franzen may assemble a good construction but he doesn't have the sympathy or empathy for his characters' conditions to be the Great American Novelist.
1
Updike was an incredibly great writer, no doubt about it. He could form prose that is just unreachable by nearly anyone else and certainly is the best of h is contemporaries. I think, however, that people pigeon-hold him as the guy who wrote about sex in the suburbs. I personally favor "The Great Gatsby" as the great American novel, but I certainly think Updike is one of our greatest writers with a long and distinguished career.
Missing from these commentaries is the more fundamental problem with the "Great American Novel." What the original "founding writers" wanted was a great American EPIC, so that the U.S. could say it was culturally as great as all those Europeans who produced Iliads, Songs of Roland, and Arthurian stories. Trouble is, the national epic was already passe because Milton one-upped it with Paradise Lost, and it was historically too late to imitate knights, Greek warriors, and culturally-universal ideas of religion. On top of this problem, there was no one "America"; there were many native ethnic and immigrant groups, and vastly different regional histories. It was obvious to most writers by the 1850s that there would never be anything besides partial epics of different experiences; this is not a "novel" idea, so to speak. The closest to a North American epic is indeed Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which includes, as major characters, members of opposing Native America tribes, British colonists from New York, a southern slave owner, British soldiers, and a heroine of mixed British and African descent, and which has as its theme the fact that the Europeans have, in true Miltonic fashion, made a more fallen world out of what could have been a transatlantic, multicultural one.
1
What possible hold does Jonathan Franzen have on current literary critics? Having suffered through his fiction -- really a struggle to read such trite stuff -- I find it amazing anyone who has read any of the truly good books mentioned here from Hawthorne, Henry James, Twain, Faulkner, Conrad, Robt Penn Warren, Bellow, Roth, more contemporary novels by Maya Angelou and Allegra Goodman, etc., would even consider Franzen's mediocre stuff to be in the same category. (Well, yes, he is commercially successful.)
1
The more you try to write "the great American novel" the less you will succeed. Just write a good novel. Did Shakespeare consciously write the greatest plays ever written? I doubt it, he just wanted to write good plays that audiences would pay money to see. Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald just wrote good stories. Heck, I consider some of Raymond Chandler's books some of the greatest American novels. Time is the judge, not the author's opinion on what he or she is writing.
The GAN is not a work of literature but a personality lived. I am not sure it belongs in a book.
Who is actually obsessed by "The Great American Novel?"
I think anyone who is, is over 50 or possibly over 60; the same readers who think Allen Ginsberg was a great writer.
Not to defame the departed, but Ginsberg was loved by many during his lifetime because he was such a character, not necessarily because of his writing. One thing is for sure, he got a lot of mileage out of one poem ("Howl"). Try reading it now, it's more difficult to get through. Too many lines begin with "I" for contemporary taste, in my opinion. In this, he was a true Modernist (read something by Appolinaire from around 1910 to compare).
I thought the idea of "the great American novel" died along with Norman Mailer.
I think anyone who is, is over 50 or possibly over 60; the same readers who think Allen Ginsberg was a great writer.
Not to defame the departed, but Ginsberg was loved by many during his lifetime because he was such a character, not necessarily because of his writing. One thing is for sure, he got a lot of mileage out of one poem ("Howl"). Try reading it now, it's more difficult to get through. Too many lines begin with "I" for contemporary taste, in my opinion. In this, he was a true Modernist (read something by Appolinaire from around 1910 to compare).
I thought the idea of "the great American novel" died along with Norman Mailer.
I always thought it was settled that Gatsby was the GAN, then and now.
I can't think of a novel that encompasses such uniquely American themes - dramatic reinvention, the acquisition of wealth and power to gain a shallow kind of love, celebrity worship, and the exposure of how ephemeral it all is, like moths flocking to the next bright light.
What was true then is still true now, and it continues to expose the dark heart of the American experience, and how far we are from our self-image.
I can't think of a novel that encompasses such uniquely American themes - dramatic reinvention, the acquisition of wealth and power to gain a shallow kind of love, celebrity worship, and the exposure of how ephemeral it all is, like moths flocking to the next bright light.
What was true then is still true now, and it continues to expose the dark heart of the American experience, and how far we are from our self-image.
2
Who is this we? And the fact that there are less than sixty comments on this posting, after more than 48 hours, speaks more to the notion of its relevance than anything I might say.
So let me just throw in this: When I was young, I had no trouble telling you what my favorite books were. As I grew older, I could run off a list of favorite writers. By the time I was in my forties that list had grown to long for anyone to pay attention to. I always enjoy when Charlie Rose asks an accomplished writer who his or her influences have been. The authors always look dumb founded. They can always throw in Shakespeare, but after that the list usually includes a dozen or so writers they are currently reading. That is how, it seems to me, it should be.
So let me just throw in this: When I was young, I had no trouble telling you what my favorite books were. As I grew older, I could run off a list of favorite writers. By the time I was in my forties that list had grown to long for anyone to pay attention to. I always enjoy when Charlie Rose asks an accomplished writer who his or her influences have been. The authors always look dumb founded. They can always throw in Shakespeare, but after that the list usually includes a dozen or so writers they are currently reading. That is how, it seems to me, it should be.
Who (besides the two writers who contributed to this article) is "obsessed" with idea of the Great American Novel? Philip Roth laid all that nonsense to rest nearly half a century ago.
do you really think a considerable number of people are "obsessed" with the great american novel? I don't think so
TO THE EDITOR:
Regarding "Bookends," Book Review, 1/18/15:
Surprisingly, Strayed and Kirsch do not mention, even in passing, two novels that come closest to this oddly American literary ideal, the Great American Novel: Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. While they attempt to address the obsession we may have for "the One," and why we keep looking for it, they do not offer much insight as to what the Great American Novel may (or should) be by any specific, "American" criteria. It may be an ideal without definition, an absurd American obsession of labeling champions, as they say, but the two great novels that they neglect to mention are, to me, definitions in themselves. Both Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath offer the best and worst of the American spirit in broad, expansive settings -- the societal, physical, racial, religious, and political geography of this diverse country-- and how one uniquely American individual tries to make sense of it all, for better or worse. And both are joyful, thoughtful journeys to read, unquestionably American throughout. They are literary without pretense, grounded in the personality of the American landscape, and timelessly honest about the troubling contradictions of our democracy.
Christopher G. Carey
Regarding "Bookends," Book Review, 1/18/15:
Surprisingly, Strayed and Kirsch do not mention, even in passing, two novels that come closest to this oddly American literary ideal, the Great American Novel: Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. While they attempt to address the obsession we may have for "the One," and why we keep looking for it, they do not offer much insight as to what the Great American Novel may (or should) be by any specific, "American" criteria. It may be an ideal without definition, an absurd American obsession of labeling champions, as they say, but the two great novels that they neglect to mention are, to me, definitions in themselves. Both Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath offer the best and worst of the American spirit in broad, expansive settings -- the societal, physical, racial, religious, and political geography of this diverse country-- and how one uniquely American individual tries to make sense of it all, for better or worse. And both are joyful, thoughtful journeys to read, unquestionably American throughout. They are literary without pretense, grounded in the personality of the American landscape, and timelessly honest about the troubling contradictions of our democracy.
Christopher G. Carey
1
My two nominees for best 20th Century American novel
"Winter Of Our Discontent" by John Steinbeck
"All The Kings Men" by Robert Penn Warren
"Winter Of Our Discontent" by John Steinbeck
"All The Kings Men" by Robert Penn Warren
1
The question is the vestigial remains of American's nineteenth-century inferiority complex; somehow the American literary enterprise had to show that could produce real honest-to-God writers just like Europe could, and that meant conquering the novel. Well, case closed by Melville and Hawthorne, but imbedded national anxieties live on.
If there's a American counterpart to "Ulysses," it's "Gravity's Rainbow" - on one level a stoner comedy about a kind of Mad Magazine version of WWII, on another a prediction of the corporate state, on another an investigation of the question: "How do we live, knowing we will die?"
If there's a American counterpart to "Ulysses," it's "Gravity's Rainbow" - on one level a stoner comedy about a kind of Mad Magazine version of WWII, on another a prediction of the corporate state, on another an investigation of the question: "How do we live, knowing we will die?"
2
The novel that most accurately depicted the obsessions of future Americans was Tom Wolfe's 1987 "Bonfire of the Vanities" with its prescient focus upon "the hunt for the Great White Defendant," such as the Duke lacrosse team, George Zimmerman or Haven Monahan, organizer of that gang rape on broken glass that we heard so much about last year. "Bonfire," sad to say, is The Great American Novel of our age.
1
I can honestly say I've never known a single person who was obsessed with the great American novel.
5
It's so absurd, given the youth of the novel in history and its rather precarious place in the future of the cultural and literary delusion known as "realism," that an obsession with a great American one should be imposed on "we."
The power of language applied to generate a Declaration of Independence or to request meaning from an answerless universe should not be conflated with the romantic fantasies "you" impose on the page.
The power of language applied to generate a Declaration of Independence or to request meaning from an answerless universe should not be conflated with the romantic fantasies "you" impose on the page.
I know a lot of fiction writers, none of whom has ever mentioned the concept of a "Great American Novel." None of them are striving to create THE best novel, a ludicrous ambition, but rather to add another stone to the grand mosaic of American fiction now in its fourth century of history. Some stones are larger than others but every one of them counts.
The Great American Novel is by American author for American readers, and is always newly published, not an old book. It reflects the author's biographical life as an individual and within a family and tells a story with observations about Americans that are readily recognized as true by readers.
1
Has Mr. Kirsch actually read MOBY DICK "again and again"? That would make him exceptional even beyond the jargon of 'American exceptionalism". Captain Ahab is indeed a maniac, but I note nothing particularly American about him that would speak to the" Darkness of our American Soul." Wow! Mark Twain, almost certainly our all-round greatest author, while manifesting that Darkness on occasion, also didn't speak to it as endemic to the American Soul, but if there is such a thing as the Great American Novel (GAN), it is almost certainly HUCKLEBERRY FINN. But why does the GAN have to speak to the Darkness of our American Soul? Dostoyevsky was darker than Tolstoy (which took some doing), but it was the latter who wrote the GRN called WAR AND PEACE, and even Solzhenitsyn's bleaker-than-bleak outpourings, which really were about the Darkness of the Russian Soul, did not displace Tolstoy as the Center of Russian Literature. For the GEN, Charles Dickens wrote at least two or three contenders, and he did write to condemn the Social Order of the Day, yet his greatest work was still affirmative and not at all addressing (only) the Darkness of the English Soul. Then we have the Germans, but really, folks, isn't enough enough?
2
Thank you. This article will make an excellent datum in my soon to arrive non-fiction "How The American Intelligentsia Imprisoned Itself".
Buell's book, and the general discussion about the Great American Novel, are surprisingly blind to the characteristics of the novels of other cultures, from the State of Britain novel to the one nation in which two novelists actually did write novel sequences that probed almost every bit of the nation - France, with Balzac and Zola. Admittedly, those two are very the century before the century before, but they left a tradition followed by Aragon, Sartre, Monthelant and to some extent Houellebecq. The German novelists like Mann and Hesse also wrote state of Germany novels. The nation-state in modernity is a romantic idea, and it makes sense that as it has developed, it has done so in tandem with the novel and cinema. After all, the nation is an imaginary act - when the citizens of the US lose their imagined identity as Americans, what do we have left except the brute force of the police and the tax collector? If we don't try to imagine america in some venue - pop music, movies, the novel, poems, theater, HBO series - as an encompassing thing, then we will, I think, begin to dissolve as Americans. But I don't see that happening at the moment.
2
The professor who apparently ridicules the idea of a GAN, managed to publish 584 pages devoted to considering, discarding and classifying various nominees, not according to de Forest's mid-19th century standards, but by some anachronistic standards closer to our own era.
De Forest wanted to see Americans writing naturalistic novels, a la Balzac, with an expanded geographical scope rather a regional one. You have to read between the lines to understand his criteria. As a former Union Army officer in 1868 (the year that 2 of the 3 Civil War Amendments had been ratified), he wasn't interested in encouraging regional Southern and New England literatures.
He specifically mentions no "ghost stories," unfortunately ruling out "Beloved," which uses a vengeful baby ghost as a metaphor for the country's relationship to slavery, as well as James Fenimore Cooper and by implication "Moby-Dick," a symbolic novel that belongs alongside "Last of the Mohicans" in the homoerotic male bonding category.
Stowe and Melville both opposed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 but she tackles it head on, while his antislavery message is so obscure no one can find it, except to say that the number of crew men equals the number of states, that Ahab's hickory-handled harpoon symbolizes the continuity between two presidents nicknamed "Old Hickory" and "Young Hickory," and that when Father Mapple invokes "patriots of heaven," it recalls words spoken by William H. Seward in congress.
De Forest wanted to see Americans writing naturalistic novels, a la Balzac, with an expanded geographical scope rather a regional one. You have to read between the lines to understand his criteria. As a former Union Army officer in 1868 (the year that 2 of the 3 Civil War Amendments had been ratified), he wasn't interested in encouraging regional Southern and New England literatures.
He specifically mentions no "ghost stories," unfortunately ruling out "Beloved," which uses a vengeful baby ghost as a metaphor for the country's relationship to slavery, as well as James Fenimore Cooper and by implication "Moby-Dick," a symbolic novel that belongs alongside "Last of the Mohicans" in the homoerotic male bonding category.
Stowe and Melville both opposed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 but she tackles it head on, while his antislavery message is so obscure no one can find it, except to say that the number of crew men equals the number of states, that Ahab's hickory-handled harpoon symbolizes the continuity between two presidents nicknamed "Old Hickory" and "Young Hickory," and that when Father Mapple invokes "patriots of heaven," it recalls words spoken by William H. Seward in congress.
2
Huckleberry Finn is the Great American Novel.
There, cleared that up for you.
There, cleared that up for you.
11
"Why Are We Obsessed with the Great American Novel?"
I know! I know! Call on me!
Because we never got out of our sophmore year.
I know! I know! Call on me!
Because we never got out of our sophmore year.
6
We're really not obsessed with it, nor even particularly interested. Most of "us" don't actually care. Engaging reads: yes! Great books: yes! Time-killers that amuse us: yes!
4
Why must there be only one? As big as America is, as various, literature is even larger and more full of variety. Choosing "the" great American novel is pointless, as your choice will be different from mine, though we can both make persuasive arguments for the choices. Why limit ourselves? It's silly.
1
For a humorous take on this subject, check out the Prologue to Philip Roth's 1973 novel, "The Great American Novel."
The Great American Novel has already been written, and it is Moby-Dick.
7
The concept of the GAN inspires a lot of literary conversation. Perhaps that's its main value.
1
Who is "We"? the Sunday Book Review?
7
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
will never be written
because, first, who cares
for even a great sprawling fiction
since there is not one Dostoevsky alive
to fill it with living vision
and then, again, who cares
for but another fantasy
however shot thru with genius
in these archetypal days of our reality
no, a novel is a plaything
of genius, and peoples
to make up for the absence
of an epic Poet
only the actual matters
anymore, only the truth
of these our lives & this our world
has any relevance whatsoever
and it is in the works
THE GREAT AMERICAN POEM
-------
Yet it is clear poetry cannot sustain the modern attention, so a “great American Poem” would not pan, though perhaps a marriage might be arranged, where prose unites with poetry (a body of work embedded with poems as a sturdy sword-hilt with gems).
In any event, any GAW (Great American Work) must include the world, for there is more to our humanity and its drama than what’s on this big island we’re on.
will never be written
because, first, who cares
for even a great sprawling fiction
since there is not one Dostoevsky alive
to fill it with living vision
and then, again, who cares
for but another fantasy
however shot thru with genius
in these archetypal days of our reality
no, a novel is a plaything
of genius, and peoples
to make up for the absence
of an epic Poet
only the actual matters
anymore, only the truth
of these our lives & this our world
has any relevance whatsoever
and it is in the works
THE GREAT AMERICAN POEM
-------
Yet it is clear poetry cannot sustain the modern attention, so a “great American Poem” would not pan, though perhaps a marriage might be arranged, where prose unites with poetry (a body of work embedded with poems as a sturdy sword-hilt with gems).
In any event, any GAW (Great American Work) must include the world, for there is more to our humanity and its drama than what’s on this big island we’re on.
1
I agree there is no one Great American Novel for all time. In that spirit I nominate Dos Passos' USA for that cry at the end that sums us up: All right. We are two nations.
1
If "The Great Gatsby" had appeared under its other considered title "Under the Red. White, and Blue" it would be the undisputed Great American Novel.
Huck a very close second. Both great stories.
Huck a very close second. Both great stories.
2
You mean "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" isn't the GAN?
I am avid reader and there are many great American novels, but in my opinion, the one that defines us is "The Great Gatsby." I've recently read Maureen Corrigan's excellent "And So We Read On" which is all about the enduring power of Fitzgerald's masterpiece, and it truly is in a class all by itself. It breaks my heart that Fitzgerald wasn't around to see how much this great book has come to be appreciated.
3
Defines who? You? Certainly not an "us".
We have Great American Novel.
My vote goes to Anton Mier's 'Once an Eagle'. It follows the career of an intelligent, ambitious young man who chooses the army as his career takes him from enlisted man in WWI France through the inter war years and depression America through WWII (by now a Major General) right up to his death in Vietnam as a three star general. Mier produced unforgettable characters and painted a picture of those 50 tumultuous years in American history that was absolutely indelible.
My vote goes to Anton Mier's 'Once an Eagle'. It follows the career of an intelligent, ambitious young man who chooses the army as his career takes him from enlisted man in WWI France through the inter war years and depression America through WWII (by now a Major General) right up to his death in Vietnam as a three star general. Mier produced unforgettable characters and painted a picture of those 50 tumultuous years in American history that was absolutely indelible.
2
Best line from "Everybody Loves Raymond" as Ray is trying to figure out how to deal with a midlife crisis:
Wife: Well what do you want to do? You're a [sports] writer. Do you want to write the Great American Novel?
Ray: I don't even want to READ the great American novel!
Wife: Well what do you want to do? You're a [sports] writer. Do you want to write the Great American Novel?
Ray: I don't even want to READ the great American novel!
6
What does "Great American Novel" even mean? Because one to be considered is "The Good Earth," written by an American -- about China!
1
We want a simple, universally meaningful work to unite readers.
1
Barely anyone reads books anymore, so how could we possibly ever have anything called the GAN? Book reading has become some kind of marginalized activity, for people living on the fringes. The rest of the masses surf the internet now.
That is nonsense. Walk through any airport, bus depot, train or Bart station at any time of day. Thousands and thousands of people waiting for their flights, trains, cars, will all be reading. And reading. And reading. And they will read when they get on. And read when they are waiting for their next connection.
We read. A lot.
We read. A lot.
10
barely nobody reads books anymore? Surely you jest! A marginalized activity for people living on the fringes?????????
5
Besides Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, how about Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel for one of the best?
7
Shush….I'm still writing it.
7
I have written the GAN, four times now, by my count. Others agree less forcefully, but nevertheless, four manuscripts are saved to disc.
The first two were obviously juvenile and derivative...because as it so happens, I was also juvenile and wildly derivative, both at the same time.
Now?
I have a novel. And a book of verse.
Forget the latter. I've made $500 dollars on it, but that was a prize (a fluke. I assure you).
Now, yes now! I understand if I'm lucky, I can maybe sell my novel to a whole new audience of readers, as the pamphlets say, on Amazon for 99 cents, or offer it for free!
Writing a novel is somewhat equivalent, in labor and effort, to building a house with your own hands. So...at today's American Artist's Average Salary Cap of .... 99 cents? for a novel, 99 cents?....it means I labored for approximately .000000001 cents per hour, more or less.
With that kind of future, who wouldn't want to be the great American novelist?
And they say we're not exceptional?
The first two were obviously juvenile and derivative...because as it so happens, I was also juvenile and wildly derivative, both at the same time.
Now?
I have a novel. And a book of verse.
Forget the latter. I've made $500 dollars on it, but that was a prize (a fluke. I assure you).
Now, yes now! I understand if I'm lucky, I can maybe sell my novel to a whole new audience of readers, as the pamphlets say, on Amazon for 99 cents, or offer it for free!
Writing a novel is somewhat equivalent, in labor and effort, to building a house with your own hands. So...at today's American Artist's Average Salary Cap of .... 99 cents? for a novel, 99 cents?....it means I labored for approximately .000000001 cents per hour, more or less.
With that kind of future, who wouldn't want to be the great American novelist?
And they say we're not exceptional?
2
Was startled to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin" high up in the story, because the true gen book is "The Confessions of Nat Turner." It really is the book about this country, what we are, and how we got there.
2
I think Cheryl Strayed has somewhat missed the point, while Kirsch is spot on. The GAN has been treated as an ironic joke for decades.
7
This topic is so over.
It's more than enough to write a great novel about anything, whatever the parameters and locale. Robert Stone did it several times, one about a guy on a boat.
R.I.P, Robert Stone.
It's more than enough to write a great novel about anything, whatever the parameters and locale. Robert Stone did it several times, one about a guy on a boat.
R.I.P, Robert Stone.
6
I certainly don't think that there is any such thing as the Great American Novel. But if I did I would nominate DeLillo's Underworld.
2
Who cares who wrote the Great American Novel? The days of ‘Great American’ anything are long past. And the Oscar goes to…the Golden Globe…the Pulitzer…the National Book Award…the Emmy…the Grammy…how pathetic is this craving for validation from others! Awards, greatness, Halls of Fame (of rock n’ roll, for God’s sake?) best’s of this and that, are the gruel that committees and critics stir up to aggrandize themselves and serve a public that needs to know what to think and who to buy. Winner of the Nobel Prize? The phrase conjures up the image of a pack of spindly legged bearded introverts and crabby feminists wobbling down a cinder track trying to elbow each other out of the way (although I suppose a million bucks is worth degrading yourself in public for, though I’ll never get the chance, I’m sure.)
The real prize for any work of art is an impact that leaves its audience breathless, speechless, and changed. That can’t be telecast, and can’t be molded into a tin statue plated with gold.
Gene Ritchings
Author of ‘Winter in a Summer Town’,
the best novel about the Jersey Shore ever written
The real prize for any work of art is an impact that leaves its audience breathless, speechless, and changed. That can’t be telecast, and can’t be molded into a tin statue plated with gold.
Gene Ritchings
Author of ‘Winter in a Summer Town’,
the best novel about the Jersey Shore ever written
15
"Great America" is alive and well and will go on FOREVER.
Gatsby is most emphatically not about a social climbing fraud. Yes, he puts on airs and accrues wealth, but this book is about a man in love. He's in love with an idealized, romanticized woman. He wants to live in an romanticized world. And Daisy no different than is America which is an imagined place, in an imagined time, all circumscribed by an imaginary woman. It is about dreams and their futility but necessity. All brought to you in some of the most beautiful writing ever penned.
But if you put Gatsby's bullet to my head I'd still choose Moby Dick.
But if you put Gatsby's bullet to my head I'd still choose Moby Dick.
7
The GAN is really just an historical construct. We look back at literature from the past, seize upon one work -- the Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Main Street, Gatsby, etc -- and say this book best represents who we were (or who we believe we were) at some point in the past. We can only be so exclusive in our reasoning when talking about a time period that has receded in our collective memories and has become a label complete with a list of cultural characteristics -- Puritanism, Americanism, small town America, the Jazz Age etc. Applying the term to more contemporary novels like the works of Tim O'Brien, Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth, or David Foster Wallace is really more about starting a debate than anything else. And, why not. There's nothing I enjoy more than a lively debate about a book.
8
Obsessed? GAN has become nothing but a cliché. Tell someone you're writing a novel, and they'll ask, "Oh, you're writing the Great American Novel." Is there a Great French Novel, a Great Russian Novel? There's room for many.
8
Hugo and Tolstoy would give you a good argument. And maybe a slap up side the head.
1
We should all stop obsessing and just admit that Moby-Dick IS the Great American Novel.
15
amen
Exactly who is obsessed with GAN problem? Lots of angels dancing on the head of a pen here. I would venture the number of people "obsessed" with this important question very small and irrelevant.
12
At one end of this construct you can place Dos Passos' USA, an exuberant everything-under-the-tent piece of work, spread out and full of stuff and at the other end, the perfect "small" novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, so very American in another way. Must the GAN "contain multitudes"? If we're Americans, do we want to believe that big novels, models established by the Europeans and Russians in the 19th century, are better novels?
6
What distinguishes Buell's excellent book about the Great American Novel is the remarkable breadth of his reading. In 2010, David Brooks made the following statement in his column: "Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,” makes at least two." Brooks was saying less about the state of American literature than he was about the simple fact that very few people are given the opportunity to even find out about the books that do make clear and provocative arguments about American life. Especially if they are written by writers who do not fit the Franzen mold: white, male, privileged. Further, critics love novels that talk about the problems in other countries, but not so much those that actually do grapple with the problems with this one. And most unfortunately, they seem to love the books publishers choose to bring to their attention, thus the same twelve books get talked about every month and many potential GANs go completely unnoticed, except by a few.
4
The Greatest American Novel? -- 'A Fan's Notes' by Frederick Exley
7
To Kill a Mockingbird. There is none better. It talks about the human condition universally.
1
"Our obsession with the Great American Novel is perhaps evidence of the even greater truth that it’s impossible for one to exist."...Cheryl Strayed
The Great American Novel emerges from time to time, "The Red Badge of Courage", "Tom Sawyer", "The Sun Also Rises", "The Great Gatsby", "To Have and To Have Not", and no less the Great American Novel is the thin volume "The Graduate", and "Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test". Each have captured America in literary snapshots and reined for awhile as The Great American Novel.
Today, the new Great American Novel resides somewhere among the books on our nightstands, or on digital pages of our Kindle, and it's yet to capture the metaphor of America in the new Millennium. "Impossible" for The Great American Novel to exist? Let me lend you my copy of "To Live Forever".
The Great American Novel emerges from time to time, "The Red Badge of Courage", "Tom Sawyer", "The Sun Also Rises", "The Great Gatsby", "To Have and To Have Not", and no less the Great American Novel is the thin volume "The Graduate", and "Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test". Each have captured America in literary snapshots and reined for awhile as The Great American Novel.
Today, the new Great American Novel resides somewhere among the books on our nightstands, or on digital pages of our Kindle, and it's yet to capture the metaphor of America in the new Millennium. "Impossible" for The Great American Novel to exist? Let me lend you my copy of "To Live Forever".
4
In a review of Biuell's book, I stated that it was nearly useless: a tome full of unsupported, highly questionable assertion marshaled to advance an undefined thesis.
Uniquely, the US from its beginning in the 18th century called upon its writers to tell the nation which was not a nation in the traditional sense of the word what it was. At the time when the novel was though a lowly enterprise, there was a rush to write the American epic--many of which took Columbus (not the real Columbus but a mythologized one) as it Aeneas. These epics, by the middle-to end of the second decade of the 19th century,were shedding their classical pretentions and looking west instead of east across the Atlantic. Although James Kirke Paulding, among others, seized the idea of the West as the heart of the American epic before him, Cooper was the first to mythologize that idea in the novel. A long progression of novels has hewn to the concept of telling America's story, not just setting stories in America.
If, by Great American Novel, we mean simply superlative American novels written by an American, that is an entorely different matter. No American fiction surpasses Moby-Dick. In the 20th century, Faulkner and Fitzgerald divide the title
Uniquely, the US from its beginning in the 18th century called upon its writers to tell the nation which was not a nation in the traditional sense of the word what it was. At the time when the novel was though a lowly enterprise, there was a rush to write the American epic--many of which took Columbus (not the real Columbus but a mythologized one) as it Aeneas. These epics, by the middle-to end of the second decade of the 19th century,were shedding their classical pretentions and looking west instead of east across the Atlantic. Although James Kirke Paulding, among others, seized the idea of the West as the heart of the American epic before him, Cooper was the first to mythologize that idea in the novel. A long progression of novels has hewn to the concept of telling America's story, not just setting stories in America.
If, by Great American Novel, we mean simply superlative American novels written by an American, that is an entorely different matter. No American fiction surpasses Moby-Dick. In the 20th century, Faulkner and Fitzgerald divide the title
6
One can clearly disagree not only about the Great American Novel itself but also about critical writing on the GAN: I enjoyed the focused intelligence and grounded judgments found everywhere in Buell's ambitious book.
1
The GAN is useful as a topic of conversation at wakes.
Imagine you've just arrived, you knew the deceased to be a petty thief, and you're hung over. A man you vaguely recognize shoves a drink in your hand.
"Cheers."
"Cheers. Thanks."
"He was good man."
"The best, yeah. A real shame."
"Yeah. Hey, I notice you've got a paperback in your pocket. What are you reading?"
"Rubbish. 'Gatsby.'"
"'Gatsby's not rubbish. It's The Great American Novel."
"No, mate, he doesn't have a patch on Roddy Doyle."
On and on. So instead of "Were you friends with him? I don't recognize you," or "What did you say you did, construction, bartending?" you engage in a spirited discussion of the GAN. It ought to last you one tall drink, after which you move on to a spirited discussion of the opposite sex, which sees you through the wake's late innings, out the door and into the lonely night of New York City.
All in favor of retaining the flawed but useful concept of the GAN, say "Aye."
Imagine you've just arrived, you knew the deceased to be a petty thief, and you're hung over. A man you vaguely recognize shoves a drink in your hand.
"Cheers."
"Cheers. Thanks."
"He was good man."
"The best, yeah. A real shame."
"Yeah. Hey, I notice you've got a paperback in your pocket. What are you reading?"
"Rubbish. 'Gatsby.'"
"'Gatsby's not rubbish. It's The Great American Novel."
"No, mate, he doesn't have a patch on Roddy Doyle."
On and on. So instead of "Were you friends with him? I don't recognize you," or "What did you say you did, construction, bartending?" you engage in a spirited discussion of the GAN. It ought to last you one tall drink, after which you move on to a spirited discussion of the opposite sex, which sees you through the wake's late innings, out the door and into the lonely night of New York City.
All in favor of retaining the flawed but useful concept of the GAN, say "Aye."
10
One point neither author mentions is that the idea of the Great American Novel, whether ironic or not, has all but eclipsed the idea of a Great American Poem. We seem to accept the idea of poetry for inaugurations, but these are more like events as opposed to what feels like a heftier and longer lasting BOOK.
4
One idea that the author's hit hard is the fact that America is a diverse and varied country, so no one story could tell the story of us all. This is hogwash. There are certain ideas, that while not exclusive to America, are universal - the need for safety and love, the desire to have one's children prosper, a need to be accepted and valued. These are universal themes that span all people and places. Couple those themes with the unique SETTING of American, and there you have your GAN. It's not easy, and surely these author's wouldn't suggest that we all must agree on the "rightness" of any work that declares itself a GAN. But I refuse to believe that a story about African-Americans can only speak to African-Americans; or that a story about a white man cannot speak to an Asian woman. If that is your criteria, then you need to keep reading and get out of the argument. There CAN be a story that is uniquely American and that speaks to our unique character - irregardless of the "characters." How can something both author's admit we all strive for (they both say we still look for the GAN) be a chimera?
4