I am no critic – just a concerned citizen. However, as Mr. Augie March states so eloquently at the end of his chronicle:
I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor, Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.
However, as an American, and one invested to a degree in the stakes of great American literature, I feel that I too must weigh in on this white whale, this Scarlet A pinned to the chest of all American novelists: The Great American Novel.
So what is it? After much soul-searching and internal debate, little research or rereading, or, you could say, pulling my limited critical faculties up from their proverbial bootstraps, I have decided that I give up: it was probably Gatsby.
Hardly original, I know.
And of the modernist novels, I personally have more affection for The Sun Also Rises. The Sound And The Fury, let’s face it: it’s too over- or underwrought, thus confusing. As I Lay Dying doesn’t quite have the popular appeal.
I always thought The Reivers deserved more traction, but it didn’t have the force of nature behind it the same as the earlier books did.
Then, a little ways off the freeway, there’s Day of The Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West. Perfect candidates – except for the fact that the Great American novel is the freeway.
And I’m sorry, I have no use for longer books in this time of great urgency. I remain ignorant of Pynchon and Delillo. Cormac McCarthy certainly courts the darkness of 20th century imperialism in his 19th century Blood Meridian that resulted in the Ruins of the 21st century portended by The Road. Still, The Great American novel cannot succumb itself to total darkness nor the feminine. Scratch off Beloved and Sula. And Invisible Man. At least there’ll be something to read in February. Until then, give dead white men their due: they must have done something worthwhile in all those years of feudalism, imperialism, corporatism. I quoth the President: History is written by winners.
But back to Gatsby: Moby Dick, you say?
Did you ever read it through? … Where’s the narrative? Wound and threaded through endless anecdotes and meditations, it’s almost lost and ultimately far too strange. As is Scarlet Letter. Besides, Americans are as sick of Puritans as we are of Freud. See Reality TV and Xanax.
Personally, my favorite American writers are Walt Whitman and Jose Luis Borges. I would vote for One Hundred Years of Solitude as The Great American novel, and one day it might be remembered as such. I like Cat’s Cradle, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and Augie March better than Gatsby(I like all the books listed above better too). My favorite American novelist is Frederick Prokosch, but he captures xenophobia and perversion a little too accurately for comfort. Besides, his morals were suspect: he likely lay with men.
I think if Denis Johnson had combined Train Dream and Jesus’ Son, part I and II, respectively, that novel would be a candidate. Instead, you have a novella and a novel in stories. Ben Lerner and Claudia Rankine have written the great American novel as a flat tire – but the great American novel is not a flat tire. But what better metaphor for the great American novel than a flat tire? Truly?
See above (freeway, remember?).
Gatsby, though, is the perfect American novel. After all, the automobile is the hero: it strikes that rich bitch down. Poe thought there was nothing more aesthetically beautiful than a dead white girl. I would agree, but he never wrote a novel, and Fitzgerald ups the anty with the dead white girl being rich. After all, as they say: she had so much to live for.
So I guess it’s Gatsby. Not my favorite, not the most egalitarian, but perfectly wrought and tragic and beautiful. It’s short too, like an empire that was over before we knew it – forgotten except for some tragic yet gourgeous vase which stands encased in glass, a footnote from some forgotten and ostentatious dynasty, long dead.