Why not do a group read of THE great American novel? Moby-Dick?

[alice malice]

Traditionally, though, the typical GAN candidate requires heft, range,
verisimilitude, and--lest we forget--popularity. While beautifully
written and constructed, both William Gaddis's demanding The
Recognitions and Peter Matthiessen's Faulknerian Shadow Country have
failed to drum up a widespread readership. Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
Dixon is, by most measures, a better attempt at a GAN than Gravity's
Rainbow, but the latter boasts a hundred times as many fans.
Similarly, works on the margin, no matter how fine or insightful about
American life, seldom make the grade. One could argue strong cases for
the GANship of John Crowley's Little, Big; John Sladek's Roderick, or,
The Education of a Young Machine; Thomas Berger's Little Big Man; or,
with just a slight stretch, Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My
Lovely--but, even now, they all remain tainted with the dread word
"genre." Yet if Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind can be proposed
for GAN honors, why not Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? Not that I'm doing
so, by the way.

http://www.vqronline.org/big-read-can-single-book-sum-nation

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 7:35 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Only problem is with the idea of the great American novel, a concept
> that has, if nothing else, made for pulp and grist to/for/from the
> mill, but it's difficult to dismiss Melville's great white whale as
> candidate, and for Pynchon fans, in the world of great books,
> Moby-Dick or The Whale is a great influence. The common whiteness
> theme alone needs further development, and, as Melville's monstrosity
> gained critical mass when the excesses of market capitalism capsized
> the nation and the world's economy, it's seem a revisiting Melville
> now makes much ado of something, though what that something is has yet
> to be defined, though some will name it and paint it in clear shades
> of blackness, it seems so  like the mysterious whale itself that
> smashes down on the masts of industry and greed, then suck all down in
> a Vortex to the bottomless perdition where God's foot weaves the
> tapestry, the mantle of Varo's Earth.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l