THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELs

hmmm not sure if direct satire of the genre is allowed - but wtf in the sprit of the thing let's just throw it all in there.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

of the ones i mentioned underworld probably best fits the bill: baseball, race, a long chronology, the bomb, bad jokes... complete virtuosity from the loony opening chapter to a joke in a russian nuke test bunker, there's a lot there - if you think delillo is an unfeeling robot, underworld might do a little to dissuade you. there's a lot of following this one baseball around and uh a bunch of other stuff i don't really remember. my sister got me a signed 1st edition when she coordinated his local reading.

usa trilogy's raw rawness is actually enhanced by its avantisms. there's something about this era's experimentation that really gets me going - it's, like, actual experimentation in service of the art, rather than the calcified esoterism of the next generation. these books meander in three ways: narrative, drugged out minute sensory observations and the disembodied headlines of the day.

winter's tale occupies the strange space of magical moralism. its great americanness is half literal and half allegorical, exposing all the weird ghouls under old new york and reveling in voyeuristic gangsterism while harboring ugly randian morality. it sounds terrible, but it is so so great. bonus fun: bob dole, the thoroughly unimaginative midwesterner spouting helprin's wild imagery at the 96 republican convention.

so let's hear about some of them gan, eh?

That said it has page after page of powerful artful sentences.

yeah well it is a great american novel and that's what we love about them.

at the risk of going off topic, how come no one ever talks about the names? totally delillo best.

American Pastoral has terrific writing, terrific characters, conversations, arguments, snippets of song and memory and it's a powerful and affecting narrative. That Roth wrote something like Portnoy's Complaint and crap like The Breast and this novel--well, it's an achievement. He dissects the American Dream in a savage and compelling manner.

Sorry to disagree, but my impressions of Underworld have only faded with time. Moby Dick and those others I mentioned all have cohesion. The first section of the baseball game is among the best stuff he's written, but the rest of the book leaves me flat.

I haven't read the Names.

and in no way does moby dick fit the category. it takes an intimate story and expands it to universality. the great american novel is all about trying to cram all the details in in a v literal manner. (there is the beginning before they hit the sea with all the immigrant descriptions and stuff, but that doesn't really make up the meat of the book.)

the great american novel is all about trying to cram all the details in in a v literal manner.

It is many different things to many different people. I'd like to think that some people may even include a poem or a short story on their list, as absurd as that sounds.

I'd also submit:

Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser

The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow

Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon

and while it's not epic enough to fit the category of GAN, John O'Hara's Appointment in Sammara captures much of the American Experience on a small scale and is a pretty great novel to boot.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez

The War At The End of the World Mario Vargas Llosa

but i am finding people's differing interpretations compelling. so certainly add whatever you like, be it short stories or comic books or whatever. descriptions are great too.

(i could see how comic books could work with my definition as they can convey a lot of the cultural debris through images. and i have heard that jimmy corrigan is great.)

g world n: the ground beneath her feet

At the risk of overstating my case, this is a perfect description of Moby Dick

the problem i have classifying it as such probably has something to do with the fact that it's not my america - ie tv, nukes, pop art, etc. not that it doesn't share a lot of similarities.

try - the internet, terrorism, hiphop.

Someone correctly noted Sister Carrie upthread. Ah, class -- the great American bugaboo. The House of Mirth is instructive.

yeah! that's why I cited O'Hara, too.

anyway i'd like to add

Gary Indiana's "Resentment" to the list.

Norman Mailer would no doubt submit his An American Dream, he's probably the last major American novelist who consciously strove to write the GAN. Maybe The Naked & The Dead works? Oh and I gather this is what Tom Wolfe thinks he's doing now.

Roger Kimball weighs in at the Weekly Standard. I... don't know what to say. I'm pretty sure this is not meant as a joke.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/great-american-novel_630022.html?nopager=1

I pause here to quote David Guaspari’s wise and amusing observation on this subject: “Comparing information and knowledge,” he writes, “is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule.”

I am not, to be candid, quite sure what the “designated hitter rule” portends, but I am confident that it has nothing to do with being green or porcine plumpness.

I love that merely picking up a contemporary novel gives him the vapors.

wow, quotes from matthew arnold AND t.s. eliot!!

lol

i feel like i don't really need to read this, do i

NO

ty!

I kind of skimmed it but I agree w/ him

I am not, to be candid, quite sure what the “designated hitter rule” portends

you get the feeling he suspects it's something of the homosexual persuasion

I kind of skimmed it but I agree w/ him

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:38 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh, you

I skimmed like three paragraphs in when I typed that, now that I just slowly scrolled down the entire thing I don't think I agree

I saw him say that franzen sucked is all ok

that young whippersnapper Toni Morrison, and her beatnik cohorts Jay McInerney...haven't finished yet but I *think* this whole thing boils down to Marlon Brando riding a motorcycle.

nm he didn't even say that franzen sucked!

fuck!

lol that's what you get, young man

it's because I didn't know the meaning of perfervid

is "perfervid" really necessary when there's "fervid"?

he sure does love to quote lots of dudes. and, it seems, not quite understand the quote, but quote it anyway. it's very droll.

one paragraph has four sentences and each of them is wrong in its own way

I am not, to be candid, quite sure what the “designated hitter rule” portends, but I am confident that it has nothing to do with being green or porcine plumpness.

you're whining about american culture and you don't know a baseball ref when you see one?

When I was in graduate school, I knew some students who believed that by making a Xerox copy of an article, they had somehow absorbed, or at least partly absorbed, its content.

that's really interesting ps i call bullshit

I suppose the contemporary version of that déformation professionelle is the person who wanders around with a computer perpetually linked to Google and who therefore believes he knows everything.

idk man you need to read something beyond bad airport mags flipping out about these nonexistent persons.

It reminds one of the old complaint about students at the elite French universities: They know everything, it was said; unfortunately that is all they know.

that's p funny but the opposite kind of complaint

wanders around with a computer perpetually linked to Google

can't read this w/o cracking up again

When I was in graduate school, I knew some students who believed that by making a Xerox copy of an article, they had somehow absorbed, or at least partly absorbed, its content.

lol. loooooooooooooooooooool. lololol. i mean, i hate/was grad students dude, but come on, man. lol.

maybe i should read this

i hate/was grad students too, i meant

i feel like i don't really need to read this, do i

― horseshoe, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 9:34 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

x1000

right?

i mean i don't need to read it right

Everyone knows Andy Warhol’s quip that someday everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Behind the humor—or perhaps I should say “behind the cynicism”—of that remark is the dark prospect of significant cultural diminishment. A quarter-hour’s fame is not fame. On the contrary, it is the demotic parody of fame; it is mere celebrity.

should he say it? doesn't matter cause he did. balls out. school's in session, boys. truth bommbs.

don't read it, Que

k

he just spouts all this speculative "of course it is often said that", "it is well accepted that" and rambles on in this doddering patronising way...I mean for a rant about novels, the dude does not cite one single example of anything even remotely resembling a novel

iaiaiaiaaia

http://www.rageboy.com/mbimages/roger-kimball-fool.jpg

idk man you need to read something beyond bad airport mags flipping out about these nonexistent persons.

eh I totally know these people fyi

The signal achievement of the novel, Trilling thought, was “involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination. .  .  . It taught us, as no other genre ever did, the extent of human variety and the value of this variety.”

Whether the American novel still plays an important role in this drama is, perhaps, an open question

you wishy-washy old windbag, you just spent 3/4 of this stupid column telling us that it's NOT an open question.

I did enjoy the piece as a doddering, patronizing, and dryly humorous piece. think his larger point is valid even if the specifics are a mess.

but yeah he does not actually discuss novels. his argument isn't even really about the quality of novels or current fiction, it's mostly him whining about digital media eroding culture in general

is "perfervid" really necessary when there's "fervid"?

― horseshoe, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:45 PM (8 minutes ago)

dfw on "perfervid":

WORD NOTES fervent
A beautiful and expressive word that combines the phonological charms of verve and fever. Lots of
writers, though, seem to think that fervent is synonymous with fervid, and most dictionaries don't do
much to disabuse them. The truth is that there's a hierarchical trio of zeal-type adjectives, all with
roots in the Latin verb fervēre (= to boil). Even though fervent can also mean "glowingly hot" (as in
Fingering his ascot, Aubrey gazed abstractedly at the brazier's fervent coals), it's actually just the
baseline term, more or less synonymous with ardent. Fervid is the next level up; it connotes even
more passion/devotion/eagerness than fervent. At the top is perfervid, which means "extravagantly,
rabidly, uncontrollably zealous or impassioned". Perfervid deserves to be used more, not only for its
internal alliteration and metrical pizzazz but because its deployment shows that the writer knows the
differences between the three fervēre-words. DFW

this piece was about as dry as roger kimball's upper lip when he cracked open The Pale King

old man yells at cloud.jpg

*schooled by dfw from the grave*

can we hazard a guess at the last novel he even read?

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2011/10/03/tgan-and-tgow/

Ursula LeGuin on the topic, and The Grapes of Wrath.

what is wrong with the hysterical realism / encyclopedic novels thread