Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[David Casseres]

Does anyone have a link to that list?

On 5/17/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
>