#AmWriting – The Great American Novel

It’s a phrase used by authors to describe a lofty goal for their writing. An aspiration of achieving something profound, important, or lasting. A novel that will still have readers years from now. It has been the traditional pinnacle to climb, the acme of a writer’s career.

At the same time, it is often used to disparage a writer’s work. “You gonna write the Great American Novel?” is a challenge to both our aspirations and our abilities. Here it becomes an impossible goal, something that no mere mortal like us could ever achieve. In my experience, this use comes from people who fear to dream and don’t want any of the rest of us dreaming either.

So what IS the Great American Novel? The phrase traces back to an essay, written in 1868, by novelist John William DeForest. DeForest was popular in his day, but one forgotten by most today. This phrase of his lives on. He defined the idea as a book that spoke to the “ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” The goal therefore was to create a story that spoke to the everyday American life. Literature at that point in time was still dominated by the writers in Europe. Their point of view would reflect that time and place. So while Dickens was a brilliant, and popular writer, he wasn’t writing about us. DeForest calls American authors to search for the American idioms and stories to create our own unique contributions to literature. Mark Twain serves as an exemplar of the idea. He wrote about the everyday American experience in a way that broke new ground in our national writing.

But what about that second definition? This crops up several decades later. Its intent, I believe, was to change the nature of the discussion. I will be honest here and say that this definition strikes me as pretentious. “High literary merit” feels designed to keep the hoi polloi (like Twain, perhaps) out of the discussion. In fact, there is an argument that its intent is to turn American writing back toward a more European cultural standard. Our culture has struggled with a desire to set off on our own from our origins, and a devotion to those roots. That conflict roots itself deep in our national psyche.

So what is “great literary merit”? I haven’t got a clue. Some may claim that this is proof positive that I am incapable of achieving it. My contention is that it means different things to different people. Some definitions seem to require great complexity of language and story. But is that part of the “ordinary…manners of American experience”? I am unconvinced. While our stories can offer as much subtlety as any other nation’s, and our use of language is colorful and creative, I’m not sure that a GAN requires them. Tom Joad’s speech at the end of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” expresses our personality for me. High flown concepts spoken in the language of every man. F. Scott Fitzgerald crafts words with great skill in a way that is different from the craftsmanship of Ernest Hemingway. Both have stories that qualify, for me, as candidates for the title “Great American Novel”.

What book springs to mind for me? It has become fashionable recently to denigrate “To Kill A Mockingbird”. I do not understand why. Harper Lee’s gentle memory tale touches on all the elements of DeForest’s definition, while meeting the literary merit standards as well. It is a quintessentially American story. The story touches on small town America, family, honor, justice, race, fear, acceptance and redemption. Lee explores the social structure of that time. It is a flawed structure at both the micro and macro levels, but then so are we as a nation. Great issues (race, poverty) play out in the daily lives of a little girl, her brother, a friend and her father. Terrible decisions are made, and justice does not win out in all cases.

The language is a beautiful evocation of time, place and character. The narrator looks back at their own childhood. So we hear the story in the voices of both Scout Finch, and the grown up Jean Louise. It allows for a nuanced storytelling that I’ve found compelling through many readings.

It’s not the only candidate by any stretch of the imagination. For me, it is the kind of book that John William DeForest had in mind when he coined the phrase “The Great American Novel”.

I don’t know that you can try to write “The Great American Novel”.  (Except that Philip Roth did just that in 1973.  Titled “The Great American Novel”, it’s a book about baseball)  It does give me something to strive for, however.  A goal worthy of the attempt.

May we all write our own great American novel, one day.

Peace

Jay