Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[Dave Monroe]

Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel  
By A.O. Scott The New York Times

TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2006 

More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that "the
Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but
mythical like the hippogriff," an observation that
Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy
1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, "The Great
American Novel." It pointedly isn't - no one counts it
among Roth's best novels, though what books people do
place in that category will turn out to be relevant to
our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal
hunt for Norris's legendary beast.
 
The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and
horse, is often taken as the very symbol of
fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But
the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid
(crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy
and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed
skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch
Ness monster. It is a creature that quite a few people
- not all of them certifiably crazy - claim to have
seen. The New York Times Book Review, ever wary of
hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary between
empirical science and folk superstition, has
commissioned a survey of recent sightings.
 
Or something like that. Early this year, the Book
Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short
letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers,
critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them
to please identify "the single best work of American
fiction published in the last 25 years." The results -
in some respects quite surprising, in others not at
all - provide a rich, if partial and unscientific,
picture of the state of American literature.
 
And as interesting, in some cases, for the reasoning
behind the choices as for the choices themselves.
Tanenhaus's request, simple and innocuous enough at
first glance, turned out in many cases to be downright
treacherous. It certainly provoked a lot of other
questions in response. "What is poetry and if you know
what poetry is what is prose?" Gertrude Stein once
asked, and the question "what is the single best work
of American fiction published in the last 25 years?"
invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and
assumptions. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as
well as economic globalization, by "American"? Or, in
the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom
weapons of mass destruction, what do we mean by
"fiction"? And if we know what American fiction is,
then what do we mean by "best"?
 
[...]
 
Even in cases - the majority - where the premise of
the research was accepted, problems of method and
definition buzzed around like persistent mosquitoes.
There were writers who, finding themselves unable to
isolate just one candidate, chose an alternate, or
submitted a list. The historical and ethical
parameters turned out to be blurry.
 
Could you vote for, say, "A Confederacy of Dunces,"
which, though published in 1980, was written around 20
years earlier? A tricky issue of what scholars call
periodization: Is John Kennedy Toole's ragged New
Orleans farce a lost classic of the '60s, to be
shelved alongside countercultural picaresques like
Richard Fariña's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up
to Me"? Or is it a premonition of the urban-comic '80s
zeitgeist in which it finally landed, keeping company
with, say, Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City"?
 
[...]
 
The question "what do you mean by 'the last 25
years'?" in any case turned out to be a live one, and
surveying the recent past caused a few minds to wander
farther back in time. One best-selling author
reflected on the poverty of our current literary
situation by wondering what the poll might have looked
like in 1940, with Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald
in its lustrous purview.
 
The last time this kind of survey was conducted, in
1965, the winner was Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man,"
which was declared "the most memorable" work of
American fiction published since the end of World War
II, and the most likely to endure. The field included
"The Adventures of Augie March," "Herzog," "Lolita,"
"Catch-22," "Naked Lunch," "The Naked and the Dead"
and (I'll insist if no one else will) "The Group."
 
In the gap between that survey and this one is a
decade and a half - the unsurveyed territory from 1965
to 1980 - that includes Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's
Rainbow" and William Gaddis's "JR," as well as
"Humboldt's Gift," "Portnoy's Complaint," "Ragtime,"
"Song of Solomon" and countless others.
 
Contemplation of such glories lent an inevitable
undercurrent of nostalgia to some of the responses.
Where are the hippogriffs of yesteryear? Not to worry:
late-20th-century American Lit comprises a bustling
menagerie, where modernists and postmodernists consort
with fabulists and realists.
 
[...]
 
To ask for the best work of American fiction,
therefore, is not simply to ask for the most
beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. The
best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear
to be those that successfully assume a burden of
cultural importance. They attempt not just the
exploration of particular imaginary people and places,
but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of
the nation itself. America is not only their setting,
but also their subject.
 
They are - the top five, in any case, in ascending
order - "American Pastoral," 7 votes; Cormac
McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Updike's four-in-one
"Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each; "Don
DeLillo's "Underworld," 11; and, solidly ahead of the
rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," 15. (If these numbers
seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only
125 votes, from a pool of potential candidates equal
to the number of books of fiction by American writers
published in 25 years.) Any other outcome would have
been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted
itself into the American canon more completely than
any of its potential rivals. This triumph is
commensurate with its ambition, since it was
Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand
the range of classic American literature, to enter, as
a living black woman, the company of dead white males
like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. When the
book first began to be assigned in college classrooms,
during an earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase
of the culture wars, its inclusion on syllabuses was
taken, by partisans and opponents alike, as a radical
gesture. But the political rhetoric of the time
obscured the essential conservatism of the novel,
which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved
precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct
them.
 
[...]
 
To look again at the top five titles in the survey is
to discover just how heavily the past lies on the
minds of contemporary writers and literary opinion
makers. To the extent that the novel can say something
about where we are and where we are going, the
American novel at present chooses to do so above all
by examining where we started and how we got here.
 
[...]

So the top five American novels are concerned with
history, with origins, to some extent with nostalgia.
They are also the work of a single generation.
DeLillo, born in 1936, is the youngest of the five
leading authors. The others were born within two years
of one another: Morrison in 1931, Updike in 1932, Roth
and McCarthy in 1933.
 
[...]
 
But the thing about mythical beasts is that they don't
go extinct; they evolve. The best American fiction of
the past 25 years is concerned, perhaps inordinately,
with sorting out the past, which may be its way of
clearing ground for the literature of the future. So
let me end with a message to all you aspiring
hippogriff breeders out there: 2030 is just around the
corner. Get to work.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/16/features/scott.php

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