Northwest Ruminations: The Impossible Dream -- The Great American Novel

This post grew out of a speech I gave to my luncheon club three weeks ago (by Webex.)

“To dream the impossible dream” – do American authors still dream of writing the Great American Novel?

The phrase was coined in 1868 by John William De Forest in a review of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It quickly became such a cliché that Henry James, in 1880, acronymed it (may Tom Johnston, my Hamilton English Prof, forgive me) to GAN. 19thC critics had it easier than today’s to catalog and nominate the GAN; the usual suspects back then:

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Melville’s Moby Dick
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (I gave my superb 2nd edition copy to a granddaughter who revered the book.)
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage

As some of you know, my usual reading is of non-fiction – history, biography, science, politics and civic affairs. Thus far this year, I have read only seven such. The Pandemic perhaps is to blame for my turn to fiction for escape and for a hunt for meaning rather than facts. It started with diving again into Tudor England by re-reading Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in preparation for The Mirror and the Light, finale of her trilogy of ambition, rise from humble beginnings, power, overreach and fall, Shakespearean in its universality. Then came La Peste, naturally, (curious, the feminine) followed by more Camus and Celine; then more English and Canadian and Columbian, finally to re-reading and reading anew American fiction. I’ve been lost in it for the last several weeks.

The last time I was on a fiction binge was during my first wife’s illness – those periods of chaos and crises. Perhaps that is what drives me into fiction, which has the power to expose and engage human meaning in a way non-fiction cannot. You can read all the studies you want of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but the truth of it is revealed by Tolstoy in War and Peace just as is the truth of the revolution’s survival by Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.

Is any in what I’ve immersed myself the Great American Novel? Not likely; not likely that there is any such thing. A GAN should have breadth of scale and scope; it should explore the American character and reveal truths about us, about what makes us uniquely American. The problem for an author, of course, is that the essence of America is change; no novel can keep up. One is a GAN only for a specific era, a passing through.

Here are possible 20^thC GAN’s:

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
Dos Passos’ USA
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom
Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
Steinbeck again: East of Eden
Kerouac’s On the Road
Heller’s Catch 22
Ellison’s Invisible Man
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Roth’s American Pastoral
Malamud’s The Natural
Updike’s The Rabbit Quartet
Morrison’s Beloved

In my humble estimation, those would make a Great American Library –especially if you add Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River collection of short stories. But you, no doubt, would nominate many more.

My friend Roger, whose Dancing on Their Tails has a touch of greatness in it (a story of male bonding, of sensitivity and empathy hiding behind a facade of crude, chauvinist machismo) notes that Vonnegut, whose Slaughter House Five he favors, and Heller and Salinger really had only one good novel in them. Is that PTSD of WWII? he asks. Is the great Viet Nam novel yet to come? I ask.

It’s impossible to encompass in any one book this ever-evolving, ever-changing country – America more in constant change than Britain or France or Russia from which great novels have come. The Great American Novel can only be the GAN for a period, an era, a passage of time – but the moral of each must be timeless.

My nominees, for universality and relevance to us in this now of economic, health, and political angst: