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The Great American Novel -- my runners-up
Moby Dick took first place, here are the next ones in line...
1. Faulkner. He came close to winning. But which novel? Absalom, Absalom is the deepest and richest. But you need to read it at least twice in a row, and that makes it less of a story. Here is the first page. As I Lay Dying is the most enjoyable. Read it through once, without trying to understand it. Then read it through voice-by-voice. Then read it through again. Sound and the Fury and Light in August (Faulkner's easiest major work) cannot be dismissed either.
2. Henry James - The Golden Bowl. Are you interested in Girardian doubles, the triangulation of desire, self-deception, the use of gifts to imprison, the mediation of desire through objects, and the dynamics of marriages? This was James's last and best novel. For my taste Portrait of a Lady is static and stands too close to the Merchant Ivory tradition. Interestingly, I believe not one of you mentioned James in the comments thread.
3. Huckleberry Finn. It seems more Shakespearian each time I read it. Right now Yana is reading it and loving it.
A few comments: Fitzgerald is not quite there. I am tempted to count Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a novel, not a poem. Willa Cather's My Antonia and Nabokov's Pale Fire are close, although my wife will not let me treat the latter as an American novel. Philip Roth has many excellent novels but no one for me stands out. Only the first third of Gravity's Rainbow is wonderful. I prefer Hemingway's short fiction and most of all his sociological non-fiction on bullfighting. Bellow is excellent but I wonder how much his books will mean to people one hundred years from now. The dark horses you already have heard about.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 11, 2006 at 05:38 AM in Books | Permalink
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Comments
Fitzgerald is not quite there.
Let me be the first to ask: why not? That's
a sufficiently idiosyncratic judgment that
I'm guessing there must be some very
interesting thought process behind it...
Posted by: Jacob T. Levy at Feb 11, 2006 9:26:52 AM
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian should be on any such list.
Ulysses as well but he's Irish, not America, so I guess it doesn't really count.
Posted by: Dave at Feb 11, 2006 10:17:47 AM
I think in addition to your criteria, there is an additional one that is critical, and perhaps most important. The GAN must be a work _that could only have arisen in America_. By that condition, of the titles I've seen mentioned here, only Huck Finn qualifies. I'm sure there are others, and I'm still thinking. Perhaps Catch-22, some Roth, surely there are others.
Posted by: floydthebarber at Feb 11, 2006 11:31:53 AM
Joyce always kept his British passport, even after independence.
You are right about James. I liked the Ambassadors as well as Golden Bowl.
JR by Gaddis has very American themes, but I am not sure it is first rank.
Scarlet Letter is a little embarrassing for Americans to recognize as archetypical.
Posted by: bob mcmanus at Feb 11, 2006 11:50:07 AM
I had to read Faulkner in college. It was the one with the 3 page long sentence about the Idiot Ike Snopes having sex with a cow, only I didn't know that until the prof told us in class later. I have not picked up Faulkner since then. Too much effort, not enough entertainment.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at Feb 11, 2006 1:07:18 PM
Roth should be on the list.
Posted by: Bill Gardner at Feb 11, 2006 1:12:38 PM
Great. Thanks. You make me want to go back to the ones I haven't read in 40 years (i'm so changed surely my reading will be); the ones you chose are so big they still send off echoes from far back in my memory.
Billy Budd. The Scarlet Letter. Faulkner as Colossus. The great old ones remain great. And if Kate Chopin can be rescued from the feminists, she, too, packs a wallop. And Cather's life force! She & Chopin give us the twentieth century battles at once - self & other.
But Fitzgerald - he seems great style but little substance. It seems strange to see him in this company--but maybe I've been missing something.
Posted by: Ginny at Feb 11, 2006 2:26:20 PM
To me it's #1 Huck Finn and #2 everything else.
Posted by: asg at Feb 11, 2006 6:51:05 PM
I haven't read any Faulkner or Henry James but I'm definitely a fan of Fitzgerald. Little substance? What do you mean? What books of his have you read?
Fitzgerald covers a different theme than others, perhaps: mainly the lifestyles of rich, intellectual dilentattes. But at the same time he cuts deep into what day to day life is about and makes witty observations on it. It's just kinda surreal sometimes.
Posted by: Ben at Feb 12, 2006 1:29:33 AM
I can't argue against Moby Dick, but I am very glad to see that Mr. Faulkner seems to be increasingly recognized (rightfully) as the single pre-eminent figure in American fiction. I would add a couple of things:
Faulkner's Collected Stories are also overwhelmingly good. "Wash" and "Golden Land" are my particular favorites, but there are dozens of powerful and finely told stories (though the relatively weak "Barn Burning" is the one most often reprinted).
Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, despite having received the Kiss of Mediocrity from the Pulitzer foundation, is a truly great novel that will change the way you look at both government and personal responsibility. It is also chock-full of great, quotable lines. Little Jackie made it stick, all right.
While JR is easier reading and has received awards, Mr. Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions, is superior artistically and emotionally. It is Mr. Gaddis's debate against his own latent misanthropy, rather than his polemic justifying it.
Posted by: sammler at Feb 13, 2006 5:23:38 AM
I'm not going to try arguing against Melville or Faulkner--they certainly
deserve their reputations. But I've never enjoyed any novel more than
Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove". For those who have seen the miniseries
but haven't read the book, you've missed a lot. Good as it was, the
miniseries completely missed the book's humor.
Posted by: Michael at Feb 13, 2006 10:14:50 AM
Excellent taste, though I've never been able to enjoy Huck like some do.
But I can't think it's a strike against Absalom, Absalom! that it has to be read twice. Of what really great novel is this *not* true?
Moby-Dick is of course excellent, but I don't think it engages with America the way that Faulkner's masterpiece does. I can imagine a Carlylean Englishman writing M-D; I cannot imagine anyone but an American writing A,A!.
(My ex-girlfriend had a good story about a Baylor professor of English who taught the same course on Absalom, Absalom! every year. One semester, however, he announced that, having studied the book with his students for 30 years, he finally felt that he understood it, and it was time to start on The Sound and the Fury.)
Posted by: Anderson at Feb 13, 2006 6:26:02 PM
Dos Passos!
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