Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

[jochen stremmel]

Found One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest more daring.
Greater and more American, too.

And Flannery O'Connor couldn't write rings around Hammett.

And I seem to remember that nobody mentioned Everybody's Autobiography or
anything else written by Gertrude Stein?


2013/5/5 <malignd at aol.com>

> To pitch in another suggestion -- Sometimes a Great Notion
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, May 5, 2013 3:28 pm
> Subject: Re: Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?
>
>
> Probably because none of these are called great by anyone in the USA.
> Rushdie, a double immigrant, but only to London, then to nyc, where, an
> understanding of America is, while not impossible, certainly idealized, in
> the romantic sense because nyc is an immigrant's world, where, unlike the
> immigrant experience in Europe, immigrants have great success, are not the
> poor rural masses who find rigid classes, but are skilled to educated
> working to professional class, and in a generation, are in th middle of it
> all, are New Yorkers, as Rushdie said in a recent interview, in no time. So
> Rushdie is right to say that he bothers who bombed boston were the dark
> side of this success story, or what their uncle called them, losers.
> On Sunday, May 5, 2013, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>>
>> Three novels which haven't been mentioned yet:
>>
>> *Tender is the Night* (Fitzgerald)
>>
>> *VALIS* (Dick)
>>
>> *The Runaway Soul* (Brodkey)
>>
>>
>> None of these is perfect, but each one is - as Rushdie wrote in his
>> review of The Runaway Soul - "worth a hundred safe little well-made books."
>> For my understanding of America these novels are very important.
>>
>>
>>
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