What makes a Great American Novel?
Literary critique of the American project — founded in 1776 on enlightenment ideals including individual rights, human flourishing, and the pursuit of happiness — is almost as old at that project itself. Literature, this essay contends, has been integral to defining, perfecting, and delineating what the United States is and should be. The (Great) American Novel as a genre continues to define and advance our conception of what the American Dream looks like and ought to look like.
There are three elements to a good American Novel. The best novels in this genre involve a beautiful blending of all three. First, the American Novel should capture the United States as it is. Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is a good example of this. His masterpiece reveals an America obsessed with image, luxury, and style. His vision of America is one enraptured by pleasure, jazz and light. But so too does it reveal a darker element of the American dream, notably immense inequalities and a tension between the nation’s egalitarian founding principles and a desire for distinction amongst the upper classes. The best American Novels do not gloss over this country’s flaws; instead, they present them alongside its virtues. In doing so, they sharpen our understanding of America’s essence.
So comes the second element of what makes a good American Novel: critique of the American project. For whilst the best American Novels present the United States as a whole, they also furnish readers with material on how to improve the American Ideal. This critique cannot be a total admonishment of the United States — such would transcend the genre of the American Novel and become a wholehearted attack on the United States as a whole. Rather, by elucidating elements that could be improved upon, the American Novel allows for internal and gradual improvement of the American project. This involves an acceptance of the core tenets and values of the principles on which this nation was founded, whilst using those same principles to extend and perfect the project as a whole. Kerouac’s Legend of Duluoz (including his most famous work, On the Road) is a good example of this: the Beat Generation — of which Kerouac was a member — is a life-affirming exploration of this great country which nonetheless laments the excessive consumerism that the United States has come to embrace. In the Dharma Bums, Kerouac refers to an alternative: a ‘rucksack revolution’ of
‘thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.’
The best American Novels reframe and advance our collective understanding of the American Dream. They transcend the descriptive realm and enter the normative — showing both what the nation is and ought to be. Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, with its subtle humour and sarcasm, is another prime example of the American Novel as a genre succeeding in both capturing the essence of the United States and advancing that ideal by bringing into question the infatuation with distinction and status.
The third element of a successful American Novel is an element of meta-fictionality. I have posited that the American Novel as a literary project emerged alongside the nation itself. In doing so, a new genre of literature emerged. Evidence of this can be seen in our linguistic uses of the term: we speak and argue over the ‘Great American Novel’ in a way that (so far as I can see) we do not do with those works stemming from other countries. The ‘Great British novel’ or ‘Great French novel’ do not have the same salience as the ‘Great American Novel,’ and there is a reason for this. For whilst these countries certainly have an established canon — think Dickens, Shakespeare, and Woolf in the case of the former, and Balzac, Hugo and Zola in the case of the latter — the American Novel is more than the mere corpus of works emerging from the United States.
Instead, it is a genre that takes as its subject the United States, with all its voices, as a whole. This is what makes the first two, descriptive and normative, elements of a good American Novel, so important. In the same vein that the United States Constitution outlines a striving to form a ‘more perfect union,’ the very best American Novels are American in that they adhere to this principle and strive for the perfection of the genre as a whole. If it is to succeed in the (first) and (second) objectives for what makes a good American Novel, it must necessarily respond to and build on those works in the genre that came before. This is what demarcates the Great American Novel from a mere corpus of works — the genre as a whole takes on a life of its own and in doing so can be read as one big story in the search of what success means in America. Hunter S. Thompson does it well in Fear and Loating in Las Vegas, when he asks:
‘but what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas.’
The very best American Novels take this a step further, both responding to the substance of what came before and innovating in style. This necessarily generates new styles and forms of writing apart from the American Novel. It is that which has given rise to the New Journalism of Thompson and Didion, the Beat style of Kerouac and Ginsberg, and the postmodernist approaches of DeLillo and Vonnegut. From this perspective, it becomes harder to pinpoint the specific stylistic elements that define the American Novel. Yet this should not be understood as a weakness of the genre. Rather it should be seen as one of its core strengths. Just like the United States itself, the American Novel as a genre is constantly evolving and refining itself. It is a genre striving to become an ‘ever more perfect’ version of itself.
