The Great American Novel?
There might be a baby in the bathwater ...
A friend of mine – a VERY good reader – sent me the article from The Atlantic that listed the 136 candidates for the honorarium of “The Great American Novel”. It has gotten a lot of traction and anything that spurs more reading, particularly more serious reading, is a good thing in our increasingly ignorant world. My first reaction to the list was that it was a sham as illustrated by the following paragraph - one I wrote before compiling my own list that is at the end of this letter.
“My complaint with the list begins with its start date – 1925. So much for the 19th century, arguably the novel’s greatest century if not in the United States certainly in the world. So much for the likes of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton. I have heard more critics cite Moby Dick (published 1851) as not only the Great American Novel but maybe the Great Novel. It only gets worse. The list of candidates for The Great American Novel is a short one – by definition. It is an EXCLUSIVE club not an INCLUSIVE (or as the writer put it – “fluid”) club. You cannot join by simply raising your hand. There are NOT 136 candidates for The Great American Novel. Teaching novels is a very effective way to uncover a novels “greatness” or, more likely, lack thereof. You can only walk into class for two weeks a year over twenty years with so many pieces of literature. Novels often fade into obscurity for a good reason. Finally, the list utterly collapses the closer it gets to contemporary times. A precious degree of curation mixed with a book-of-the-month-club sensibility creates a contemporary list with all the weight of a curbside lending library.”
My snarky reply and the assembling of the attached list led to a minor revelation of sorts. Once I finished my gilded and time-honored Great American Novel list, I felt it needed to be dusted off. With a few exceptions, the list is very WHITE, very MALE and, sadly, DATED. Many are immortal novels; however, most come from a world that was as exclusive as the list itself. While 136 novels make inclusion a bit of a joke, The Atlantic list recognizes the vast number of voices that were not heard for so long. My upbringing, my education and my teaching were, up to the last few years, imbedded in a fertile but narrow landscape. There is no questioning the art and the timelessness of the material. The “dust” I spoke of can be labeled “origin” dust – not unlike the dust that rests on the great works of the ancients and Shakespeare. Tiny worlds often produce masterpieces. The world of literature is no longer tiny. It expansiveness, relative unfamiliarity and inclusivity confuses me and, thus, my initial defensive response. With this apology as a preface, here is my dusty list.
The list are all books I have read. There are many potential great American novels I have not read (e.g., Dreiser’s Sister Carrie or Wallace’s Infinite Jest). There are maybe even more I have started and not finished (e.g., quite a few from Thomas Wolfe and Saul Bellow). The list begins in 1850 and will be bound by the number 20. Finally, I have a very hard time including recent novels NOT because they come from a different world but because they are … RECENT.
1850 The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne … though written in a style far removed from our Tik-Tok world, the novel only grows in relevance.
1851 Moby Dick by Herman Melville … as timeless as it is dated, many argue it was the world’s first “modern” novel … often reads like secular scripture.
1881 Portrait of a Lady by Henry James … perfect within all of its imperfection … the great American novel that does not take place in America … another great heroine written by a man.
1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain … It is fading away from the reading lists of higher education partly of the obvious but and because it is too accurate in its portrayal of the American id … read Percival Everett’s James afterwards.
1899 The Awakening by Kate Chopin … an “awakening” in every respect … the density of its prose reflecting the weight of its trailblazing place in the American canon.
1918 My Antonia by Willa Cather … a dead heat with Death Comes to the Archbishop … each making the Wild West profoundly less “wild” and profoundly more human.
1920 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton … may be the greatest “summing up” novel in the American canon.
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald … our epic poem …
1926 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway … awkward inclusion for many reasons … his short stories are his masterpieces but I had to make room for this boorish genius.
1930 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner … take your pick: The Sound & the Fury, Absalom Absalom, Light in August … a list without Faulkner is instantly irrelevant. Like Hemingway, he changed not only how we write but how we think.
1940 Native Son by Richard Wright … its fury broke the sound barrier and forced people to listen as few books have. Read this and then watch the epic ESPN documentary on OJ.
1946 All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren … maybe the most overlooked of the great American novels. Poetry and politics ablaze …
1951 The Catcher in the Rye by John Salinger … have any of the “coming of age” novels even come close to this? Once you think you have forgotten it, read it.
1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison … the great novel he had within him … it was all we needed. Maybe the most disturbing first chapter in American Literature.
1952 East of Eden by John Steinbeck … written later in his life, this is his great book … biblical - literally and figuratively.
1955 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov … tops many all-time lists … so brilliant it verges on the unreadable (particularly if read by Jeremy Irons).
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee … a case study in the power of simple writing … a book, a movie and a play that has achieved in its mainstream way more for race relations than much of the shock & awe material that has followed it …
1987 Beloved by Toni Morrison … like an altogether different book, The Great Gatsby, Morrison’s novel is rooted in poetic language … a language that can address the inexpressible …
1990 The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien … hard not to bring the greatest most literary of Vietnam novels onto the list …
2006 The Road by Cormac McCarthy … it felt like an instant classic when I first read it … still does – even more so as our world devolves …
The list reads like a survey course one either took or avoided in the college years of yore. Maybe that was the point of The Atlantic’s 136-book list – something new & different … fresh faces in every sense. Maybe the world has begun to walk away from any version of a canon and the 136 are the equivalent of a literary brokered convention. If that is the case, preface in mind, I fear that in the vast reshuffle, more may be lost than just a bunch of mostly white, mostly privileged voices. I cannot help but think of the final paragraph of the most recent novel on my list, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where all living things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
NOTE:
1. The 1960 to 1987 GAP is significant. There were so many great writers and so many great novels that time is required to sort things out a bit.
2. The short story collections are the great omission: Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Salinger, Cheever, O’Connor and many more … for another day.
Thank you for reading
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