…or great European, Asian, African, etc. novel? Just today I was discussing this with my friend. If you or I were to write the “great American novel,” what would the criteria for that be? I’m of the opinion that it would be any novel written by an American that was considered great; thus, a novel from any imaginable genre that showed exemplary writing or had a great story could be considered.
His idea, however, was one that I think more people come up with when they consider the GAN: a great story set in America, that your normal literate American could relate to. For one example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird would fit the criteria for both of us, but Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game would fit only mine. My friend and I both agreed that these were both excellent books, but Andrew Wiggin and company just don’t fit his criteria for the GAN.
What do you think? What would your criteria be? And is there/are there any book(s) you can point to right now and say, “See, this/these is/are the great American novel(s)!”?
Whoa!!! Your question could be considered to be similar to “How long is a string?”
Just how demanding should one be before calling a novel “great”?
I don’t think there would be any quarrel with me submitting Melville’s *Moby Dick * as a novel that fits both you and your friends criteria. Beyond that???
The “classic” great American novel is Huckleberry Finn. Other contenders usually include The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms and a few like that. I certainly would include To Kill a Mockingbird.
You’ll see some common threads, the most important being that they’re all coming-of-age novels. A young, naive central figure is exposed to a situation that forces him (or her, if it’s Scout) to mature quickly. I’d guess a lot of people would include a strong moral tone as part of the coming of age.
Even an anti-heroic novel like Catcher in the Rye includes the coming of age theme.
I can’t say that I’m familiar enough with novels from other cultures to know if those themes are completely universal, but I do believe there is a unique naivete that characterizes the protagonist in the GAN.
That “Great American Novel” conjures up a window in time when the American Fronitier had been closed within living memory, but the nation’s assesment of itself had not yet devolved into the bland TV car commercial it is today. This window of reflectivness fell within the 1920’s to 1930’s, and by the time Herman Wouk wrote “Youngblood Hawke” after WWII “The Great American Novel” was an open joke.
One can read all of what the editors wisely left of Thomas Wolfe’s “Oh This and Oh That,” as I had when I was young and had the time, or one can red Bret Harte’s “Brooklyn Bridge,” which is the era’s “great American poem,” distilling the sentiments essense much as brandy distill’s wine’s. Or the reader can trudge through Faulkner, seeing the Black/White, Civil War rent as integral to the American psyche. (problem is, most American don’t give a crap about the Broklyn Bridge or the Civil War)
As a native Midwesterner, I favored reading my fellow middle-borderians Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and self-diasporate Ernest Hemingway. (Damn if still today you can’t navigate the streets of Chicago using Dreiser!) Back then the American Midwest had something to say about the culture at large. Today it’s just agribusiness, and a rock & roll rennaisance that ain’t gonna happen.
So I’d have to say the the phrase “Great American Novel” is a marketing ploy devised by Max Eastman to put some fire under his pet projects, and taken too, too seriously as an overall concept by the reading public.
The one who started this thread asked wich is the great American story, or european, or african. But up to now you only wrote about U.S.A. authors and novels. There are certainly great authors in other parts of the continent, Cortazar, Carpentier, Bioy Casres, Borges, Machado de Assis. Etc. My favourite american novel is “Los pasos perdidos” by the cuban author Alejo Carpentier.