Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

[alice wellintown]

Can't quite follow your logic here. In any event, why can't GR qualify? It
does take on American racism. It is clearly an American novel, written by
an American, it is about America, surely, and while its setting is not
restricted to the USA, it is uniquely American through and through. The
critical error has long been corrected, trp, writes American, is. American.

On Sunday, May 5, 2013, wrote:

> Not all great American books would be in the running for Great American
> Novel, unless that grandiose term simply means any great (well-written,
> and/or with unforgettable characters, and/or incredibly entertaining or
> moving or thought-provoking subject-matter, and/or etc.) novel written by
> someone who has resided in the US for a reasonable amount of time (is
> Nabokov really an American writer? Plenty of arguments to be made one way
> or the other.) But I think most people would say that to qualify for the
> title, a novel has to express some sort of overriding theme that's uniquely
> American. Books that deal with American racism (Invisible Man, Huck Finn,
> Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird), or books with a broad panoramic scope
> (USA, Against the Day) might be an example. But they aren't necessarily the
> greatest books ever written in America. And where do Vonnegut and Heller
> and Philip K. Dick fit in? What about On the Road (poorly written, but very
> American). Confederacy of Dunces? Little Women, even. Gravity's Rainbow is,
> in the opinion of many of us here, one of the greatest American books, but,
> thematically, I don't think it's uniquely American, and certainly doesn't
> qualify as a Great American Novel. So maybe being the Great American Novel
> isn't all it's cracked up to be. As Tara points out, the 20th century was
> the American century, and if it wasn't written by then, it ain't gonna be
> written any time soon.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jochen stremmel **
> Sent: May 5, 2013 4:56 PM
> To: malignd at aol.com <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'malignd at aol.com');>
> Cc: pynchon -l **
> Subject: Re: Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?
>
> 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 <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'malignd at aol.com');>>
>
>> To pitch in another suggestion -- Sometimes a Great Notion
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com <javascript:_e({},
>> 'cvml', 'alicewellintown at gmail.com');>>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
>> '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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