Yeah, I read his first seven novels and enjoyed them well enough, but I personally don’t see him on this list. As you said, tastes do vary.
Quote from the article:
So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. … Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible.
You might as well think the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s list of honorees is decided impartially.
The article is titled The Great American Novels. If they had left out the “The” fewer people would have a problem with the list. I’m all for bringing authors to the canon beyond those proverbial dead white males who were lionized when I was young. I’m all for including genre novelists in the canon, something I started arguing in the 1970s. I assume that all the books on the list are interesting and well written and say something meaningful about American society.
But that also means I can tell when the outcome is curated. It feels coated with good intentions from white liberals. I’m a white liberal; I can smell the presence of my own. Good intentions are certainly better than bad intentions. Society cannot exist without good intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions sometimes carry with them a whiff of falsehood, that unpleasant scent that creates the asinine notion that people who benefit from affirmative action are not worthy, not as good as their peers, not part of “us.”
You brought this on yourself, The Atlantic. Your very name reeks of 150 years of East Coast elitism. Don’t pretend you aren’t still elitist. I read your magazine. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes I want to throw it at a wall. Sometimes I look at a list that doesn’t include To Kill A Mockingbird presumably because it has been so savaged by black writers that it is too politically incorrect to add to a list of The Great American Novels. Sometimes I go hmm.
I saw this list and have read a couple dozen, most of which were enjoyable. But I have no specific desire to read “The Great American Novel”, whatever that means. These lists are fine, but I am more likely to want to read the “22 funny novels” posted in the NYT - provided they are actually so. Few of the novels Dopers personally found funny seem to be on that list; and I have not heard of a big percentage of them.
“The Great American Novel” was only briefly a thing, anyway. If there was an era when the US felt great about itself, that would have been when it beat Spain and then licked the Kaiser, but before the Crash of ‘29. Never mind Jim Crow and bans on non-WASP immigration, and yes, this is part of the Great America that MAGA yearns for (the other, of course, being the post-WWII hegemony. Rock on, Lee Atwater).
For me, the premier Great American Novelist was Thomas Wolfe (not among the 136 listed). He came out of nowhere and traveled everywhere, writing mountains of rhapsodies about it all: from odes to mountain ranges to the description of a sex encounter when he was a little boy delivering groceries. After him, the concept compartmentalized, into East Coast elites influenced by Proust; Jewish assimilates like Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth; and Southern Gothic with talents both large and small. All that was left of Thomas Wolfe was the phrase “you can’t go home again.” And that remains true for the Great American Novel.
He has a point.
Yes, that and then meticulously count how many “undeserving” non white male authors are present so you can complain about wokeness gone mad.
Oh that absolutely happens, but I believe his point is that people will immediately apply some sort of litmus test to the entire list, and if that one book or a couple of books they think are great are not on there, well then the whole list must be bad and I’m not going to look at it.
And that really can’t be how these lists work, because that book you might think is great? I think it’s awful (and I do mean that literally, some books being decried in this thread for their absences are in my opinion dreadful), and that will be true for a lot of people in a lot of books. The way I took the list is, some of my fellow Americans thought they were books that fully defined some part of the American experience, and I’m at least willing to browse them and give some of them a chance for that reason. (Especially because, yes there are some books on the list that I could not finish that I thought were bad, but there are also some magnificent books on that list from my perspective)
I didn’t do this, but I did tote up the male/female ratio (as best I could, not being able to tell the sex of some of the authors from names) and noted that it seemed pretty close to 50/50. But I’m not complaining about it.
No list of books will make everyone happy, and they’re not supposed to. Everyone has different tastes.
What I find odious is the implication that people are really faking it when they find artistic merit in works that aren’t generated by a specific subset of humanity.
This is also far too common when it comes to music and movies too. Just look at the Oscars thread where it was heavily implied that wokism was the only reason certain works were receiving recognition.
Okay, but what about the accusation of performative inclusion? There are authors on the list, Black and/or gay, who are not James Baldwin or Toni Morrison, but Baldwin and Morrison each received two slots. Rather than fill those slots with authors including two who might be Black and/or gay, who do they give them to? Who is that fair to?
I don’t know how I did not notice that.
Owen Meany is my all-time favorite novel.
mmm
There are three entries by Toni Morrison, and two each for William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Octavia Butler.
I don’t have any major quibble with the list, but if they had limited it to one book per author, it could have included several other great works.
I’ve read four of them: Charlotte’s Web, Fahrenheit 451, The Haunting of Hill House, and A Wrinkle in Time. None of them in school.
I’ve read 11 of them. Watchmen and maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are the only ones that I’d consider to be among the best novels I’ve ever read. You’d have to pay me a lot to get me to slog through The Great Gatsby or The Sound and the Fury again.
That would probably be better for a list like this, but just imagine the fights in the back room about which book should be included!
Gatsby is a short quick read. Hard to imagine it on the same slog terrain as Faulkner. But I rank it as the greatest novel of the first half of the 20th century, so I’m kinda biased.
That raises a question. Outside of children’s books, what is the shortest novel on the list? Gatsby is a strong contender. What’s the longest? Anybody want to take a stab at it?
Maybe The Stand. Although the list shows it as being published in 1978, it’s described as “his 1,100-page tome,” which would only apply to the uncut version published in 1990, so it’s not clear which version is supposed to be on the list.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is not terribly long. At least it read fast.
I’ve read 33 on the list and liked most. There are probably at least ten of my unread books that I’ve been meaning to read for ages.
Giovanni’s Room comes in at 159 pages.
I’d have to think more about it, but that’s defensible.
Before I read the list, my picks:
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins
East Of Eden - John Steinbeck
Back to report: Including the two of my picks that were on the list, I’ve read only thirteen of them. None of them in High School, back in the 60’s.