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I hold out my hand. Take it, and wade with me into the murky waters of literary criticism as we consider the Great American Novel. Or, rather, Lawrence Buell’s 584-page new survey, The Dream of the Great American Novel. I’ve read several lengthy reviews of this book, as well as excerpts, and although I want to warm to the subject, I am feeling the chill of excessive academicism. Yes, there has to be more to literary criticism than “I liked it,” but I’m not ready to sacrifice on the altar of subjectivity my regard for an author’s achievement of beautiful writing or the creation of drama involving believable characters.
The entire concept of a Great American Novel (or G.A.N. as Henry James mockingly dubbed it) has come under repeated waves of skepticism, surviving “more as a dream than a goal,” Adam Gopnik suggests in his review in The New Yorker review (link below). Buell himself suggests that critics have believed the G.A.N. was “a misguided amateurish notion that had long since outlived its usefulness if ever it had any.” By the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Kimmage says in The New Republic, literary scholars “rejected the very notion of an American literature.”
The narrative form of the idealized G.A.N, Buell says in Salon (link below), is expected to “replicate the nation’s vast, sprawling, semichaotic social textures and landscapes from the macro to the minute.” Such an endeavor has been decried by some critics as “documentation for its own sake” and “the great American bore.” Yet, the sweeping realistic novel that would describe all social classes and stations of a particular historical period, that would have a narrative agenda—think Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, or Zola—has not typically appeared in American literature. As Gopnik suggests, “in a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly.”
Buell believes our greatest novels have splintered into four main subtypes, or “scripts” (and many of his observations apply equally well to American movies): tales of sexual transgression and punishment (e.g., The Scarlet Letter and its multitudinous progeny); the “up from” novel, which follows the protagonist from obscurity to prominence, and often back again; the romance of the divide, which dramatizes racial, cultural, or geographic fissures (all of Faulkner; Gatsby); and the “compendious meganovel,” which is generally not a true societal macrocosm, but more of a microscopic examination of a particular group of people or episode(The Goldfinch, Underworld, possibly).
Buell bases part of his analysis on the democratic notion that bloggers, internet chatters, and Amazon commenters’ views are important, too, thereby eroding the “firmness of the high culture versus mass culture distinction.” That seems admirable in concept, but shaky in execution, having tested my perceptions of various books against those of my fellow-amazonians and found bewildering diversity, with “Brilliant—best book ever!” followed by “Blech. Couldn’t finish it.” And, all-too-clearly, what sells is not the same as what is of lasting value.
For the record, books repeatedly cited as leading G.A.N. candidates by Buell and his reviewers include the schoolroom staples: Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn, along with Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy,” Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (By contrast, the aforementioned readers place at the top of their lists of favorite books the works of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Rings.) More recent G.A.N. candidates include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I did finish that one, but I didn’t want to.
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