An elegy for the great American novel

[Monte Davis]

Jeez, I hadn't thought of the G.A.N. for years. Mailer himself had stopped
talking about it long before the bookchat crowd did -- and no thanks to the
Independent for resurrecting it :-(

Seems to me the very idea was a product of a unique moment, when

(1) a GI-bill reading public, the Book of the Month Club , and a certain
residual cultural ambition  even at places like Time Inc. (yes, children, it
was so) made it briefly possible to believe that one novel might Matter
right across the spectrum from high to mass culture.

(2) that Hemingway-through-Styron span when the Manly Man Celebrity Writer
was an icon -- sure he spent suspiciously long hours closeted <heh> with a
typewriter, but he tackled Big Themes and in between he drank and feuded and
offered Big Opinions about sports and politics and the national character,
and wrote about Marilyn Monroe, or screwed her, or married her, or
something.

(3) American writing was getting over the worst of its uneasy "we're all
grown up" self-consciousness w/r/t England and Europe, but at the
high-culture end everyone had read (or heard of) Leavis' The Great Tradition
and wanted a handy shortlist of who we had who was (a) world class and (b)
big enough to fill Hemingway's right shoe and Fitzgerald's left.

Does anybody here doubt that our guy has written one or three great novels
(don't ask) that are unmistakably, inescapably American? Does anyone lose
sleep over the knowledge that The Da Vinci Code probably surpassed his
lifetime cumulative sales in a few weeks?