Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

[Mark Kohut]

Of course NOT, fully or we could not learn anything from novels, from books...
 
if we all could only know what we have lived, solipsism would be its own self-education. Which it can be
but "self-criticism shoudln't work, but it does" is also true. 

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, May 5, 2013 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?




I would not say of years or tin drum or German lessons, let alone all quiet, gave me any clue about Germany; reading is tourism, and tourism is not about knowing, but sensation. To learn America, or Germany, one needs to live it.   Right?  
On Sunday, May 5, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:


>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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