More than a
century ago, Frank Norris wrote that "the Great American Novel is not
extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff," an observation
that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy
1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, "The Great American Novel."
It pointedly isn't - no one counts it among Roth's best novels, though what
books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our
purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris's legendary
beast. The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken
as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But the
Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage,
high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism),
may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster - or sasquatch,
if we want to keep things homegrown. It is, in other words, a creature that
quite a few people - not! all of them certifiably
crazy, some of them bearing impressive documentation - claim to have seen. The
Times Book Review, ever wary of hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary
between empirical science and folk superstition, has commissioned a survey of
recent sightings.
And
as interesting, in some cases, for the reasoning behind the choices as for the
choices themselves. Tanenhaus's request, simple and
innocuous enough at first glance, turned out in many cases to be downright
treacherous. It certainly provoked a lot of other questions in response, both
overt and implicit. "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?" Gertrude Stein once asked, and the question
"what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25
years?" invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and assumptions.
Nothing is as simple as it looks. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as
well as economic globalization, by "American"? Or, in the age of
James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.'s,
what do we mean by "fiction"? And if we know what American fiction
is, then what do we mean by "best"?
A tough question, and one that a number of potential respondents
declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence. There were
those who sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the
summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks - they hadn't read
everything, after all - and also those who railed against the very idea of such
a monument. One famous novelist, unwilling to vote for his own books and
reluctant to consider anyone else's, asked us to "assume you never heard
from me."
More common was
the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the deplorable modern mania for
ranking, list-making and fabricated competition, would not only distract from
the serious business of literature but, worse, subject it to damaging
trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best - or even to establish a
short list of near-bests - would be to risk the implication that no one need
bother with the rest, and thus betray the cause of reading. The determination
of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned
judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing.
Criticism should not cede its prickly, qualitative prerogatives to the
quantifying urges of sociology or market research.
Fair enough. But
there would be no point in proposing such a contest unless it would be met with
quarrels and complaints. (A few respondents, not content to state their own
preferences, pre-emptively attacked what they assumed
would be the thinking of the majority. So we received some explanations of why
people were not voting for "Beloved," the expected winner, and also
one Roth fan's assertion that the presumptive preference for "American
Pastoral" over "Operation Shylock" was self-evidently mistaken.)
Even in cases - the majority - where the premise of the research was accepted,
problems of method and definition buzzed around like persistent mosquitoes.
There were writers who, finding themselves unable to isolate just one
candidate, chose an alternate, or submitted a list. The historical and ethical
parameters turned out to be blurry, since the editor's initial letter had not
elaborated on them. Could you vote for yourself? Of course you could:
amour-propre is as much an! entitlement of the
literary class as log-rolling, which means you could also vote for a friend, a
lover, a client or a colleague. But could you vote for, say, "A
Confederacy of Dunces," which, though published in 1980, was written
around 20 years earlier? A tricky issue of what scholars call
periodization: is John Kennedy Toole's
ragged
The question
"what do you mean by 'the last 25 years'?" in any case turned out to
be a live one, and surveying the recent past caused a few minds to wander
farther back in time. One best-selling author (whose fat novels seem to have
been campaigning for inclusion in this issue long before the editors dreamed it
up, even though not even he bothered to vote for any of them) reflected on the
poverty of our current literary situation by wondering what the poll might have
looked like in 1940, with Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald - to say nothing
of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis
- in its lustrous purview. The last time this kind of survey was conducted, in
1965 (under the auspices of Book Week, the literary supplement of the
soon-to-be-defunct New York Herald Tribune), the winner was Ralph Ellison's
"Invisible Man," which was declared "the most memorable"
work of American fiction published since the end of World War II, and the most
likely to endure. The fi! eld back then included "The Adventures of Augie March," "Herzog," "Lolita,"
"Catch-22," "Naked Lunch," "The Naked and the
Dead" and (I'll insist if no one else will) "The Group." In the
gap between that survey and this one is a decade and a half - the unsurveyed territory from 1965 to 1980 - that includes
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and
William Gaddis's "JR," as well as "Humboldt's Gift," "Portnoy's Complaint," "Ragtime," "Song
of Solomon" and countless others.
Contemplation of
such glories lent an inevitable undercurrent of nostalgia to some of the
responses. Where are the hippogriffs of yesteryear? Could they have been dodos
all along? Not to worry: late-20th-century American Lit comprises a bustling
menagerie, like Noah's ark or the island of Dr. Moreau, where modernists and
postmodernists consort with fabulists and realists, ghost stories commingle
with domestic dramas, and historical pageantry mutates into metafiction.
It is, gratifyingly if also bewilderingly, a messy and multitudinous affair.
It is perhaps
this babble and ruckus - the polite word is diversity - that breeds the impulse
of which Sam Tanenhaus's question is an expression:
the urge to isolate, in the midst of it all, a single, comprehensive
masterpiece. E pluribus unum, as it were. We -
Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks
dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include
everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our
intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary
tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own
coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such
anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books.
To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not
really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read.
We all have our personal favorites, ! but I suspect that something other than individual taste
underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to
our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural
importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary
people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the
nation itself.
They are - the
top five, in any case, in ascending order - "American Pastoral," with
7 votes; Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"
and Updike's four-in-one "Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each;
"Don DeLillo's "Underworld," with 11;
and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," with 15.
(If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125
votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of
fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural
significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)
Any other outcome
would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the
American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With
remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less than 20 years after its
publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to
say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was
Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic
American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead
white males like Faulkner, Melville,
It is worth
remarking that the winner of the 1965 Book Week poll, Ralph Ellison's
"Invisible Man," arose from a similar impulse to bring the historical
experience of black Americans, and the expressive traditions this experience
had produced, into the mainstream of American literature. Or, rather, to reveal
that it had been there all along, and that race, far from being a special or
marginal concern, was a central facet of the American story. On the evidence of
Ellison's and Morrison's work, it is also a part of the story that defies the
tenets of realism, or at least demands that they be combined with elements of
allegory, folk tale, Gothic and romance.
The American
masterpieces of the mid-19th century - "Moby-Dick," "The Scarlet
Letter," the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, for that matter, "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" - were compounded of precisely these elements, and nowadays
it seems almost impossible to write about that period without crossing into the
realm of the supernatural, or at least the self-consciously mythic. This is
surely what ties "Beloved" to "Blood Meridian." Both novels
treat primordial situations of American violence - slavery and its aftermath in
one case, the conquest of the Southwestern frontier in the other - in
compressed, lyrical language that rises at times to archaic, epic strangeness.
Some of their power - and much of their originality - arises from the feeling
that they are uncovering ancient tales, rendering scraps of a buried oral
tradition in literary form.
But the recovery
of the past - especially the more recent past - turns out to be the dominant
concern of American writing, at least as reflected in this survey, over the
past quarter-century. Our age is retrospective. One obvious difference between
"Invisible Man" and "Beloved," for instance, is that Ellison's
book, even as it flashes back to the Depression-era South
and the
In some ways, the
mode of fiction McCarthy and Morrison practice is less historical than
pre-historical. It does not involve the reconstruction of earlier times - the
collisions between real and invented characters, the finicky attention to
manners, customs and habits of speech - that usually defines the genre. But to
look again at the top five titles in the survey is to discover just how heavily
the past lies on the minds of contemporary writers and literary opinion makers.
To the extent that the novel can say something about where we are and where we
are going, the American novel at present chooses to do so above all by
examining where we started and how we got here.
IF
"Beloved" and "Blood Meridian" pull us back to a premodern American scene - a place that exists beyond
realism and in some respects before civilization as we know it - the other
three novels trace the more recent ups and downs of that civilization. Indeed,
it is only a small exaggeration to say that "Underworld,"
"American Pastoral" and "Rabbit Angstrom" are variations on
the same novel, a decades-spanning tale rooted in the old cities of the Eastern
Seaboard. Needless to say, the methods, the characters and the voices are quite
distinct - no one would mistake Roth for DeLillo or
Updike for Roth - but these are differences of perspective, as if three
painters were viewing the same town from neighboring hillsides.
The three novels
do what we seem to want novels to do, which is to blend private destinies with
public events, an exercise that the postwar proliferation of media
simultaneously makes more urgent and more difficult. Rabbit Angstrom, high
school basketball star, typesetter-turned-car-dealer, as carelessly loyal to
his country as he is unfaithful to his wife, is an incarnation of the American
ordinary made exemplary by the grace of God and of Updike's prose. Especially
in the later novels, his consciousness becomes the prism through which the
unsettled experience of the nation is refracted. The war in
"Rabbit
Angstrom" is not, strictly speaking, a novel of retrospect; it was written
in the present tense and in real time, each segment composed before the end of
the story could be known. Because of this - because Updike's gift for observing
the present has always outstripped his ability to animate the past -
"Rabbit," like the great Russian and French realist novels of the
19th century, becomes an unequaled repository of historical detail. Next to it,
Updike's attempted multigenerational chronicle of 20th-century American
history, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," looks thin and stagy.
Alongside Rabbit
there is Zuckerman, his near contemporary, and like him the product of a small,
industrial mid-Atlantic city. More pointedly, perhaps, there is Swede Levov, the hero of "American Pastoral" (Zuckerman
being the self-effacing narrator), who is, like Rabbit, a star athlete in high
school and whose nickname curiously recalls Rabbit's ethnic background. But
while Rabbit is, for all the suffering he endures and inflicts, a fundamentally
comic character, his destiny arcing toward happiness, Swede's trajectory is
tragic. Fate has raised him high in order to see how far he might fall. He contains
traces of Job - his fidelity to America tested by brutal and arbitrary
misfortune - and also of Lear, snakebit by one of the
most floridly and obscenely ungrateful children in all of literature.
The agonized
question that ripples through "American Pastoral" is "what
happened?" How did the pastoral America of Newark in the 40's and 50's -
an Eden only in retrospect - come apart? And its selection over Roth's other
books is indicative of how important this question is taken to be. Over the
past 15 years, Roth's production has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so
excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split. If we had asked for the
single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, he would have won, with
seven different books racking up a total of 21 votes. Within these numbers is
an interesting schism. The loose trilogy of which "American Pastoral"
is the first installment - "I Married a Communist" and "The
Human Stain" are its companions - accounts for 11 votes, while 8 are
divided among "Sabbath's Theater," "The Counterlife"
and "Operation Shylock," and another 2 go to "The Plot Against
America." The Roth whose primary concern is the past - the ele! giac,
summarizing, conservative Roth - is preferred over his more aesthetically
radical, restless, present-minded doppelgдnger
by a narrow but decisive margin.
A similar split
occurs among DeLillo's partisans, who favor the
historical inquiry of "Underworld" over the contemporaneity
of "White Noise." (There were also two voters who chose "Libra,"
a more narrowly focused historical fiction and in some ways a rehearsal for
"Underworld.") Like "American Pastoral,"
"Underworld" is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful
nostalgic undertow back to the redolent streets of a
postwar Eastern city. Baseball and the atom bomb, J. Edgar Hoover and the
science of waste disposal are pulled into its vortex, but whereas Updike and
Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal, of
implication and missing information. But more than his other books,
"Underworld" is concerned with roots, in particular with ethnicity.
Nick Shay, at first glance another one of his tight-lipped, deracinated
postmodern drifters, turns out to be a half-Italian kid from the old Ea! st Bronx, and the characteristic
rhythms of DeLillo's prose - the curious noun-verb
inversions, the quick switches from abstraction to earthiness, from the
decorous to the profane - are shown to arise, as surely as Roth's do, from the
polyglot idiom of the old neighborhood.
So the top five
American novels are concerned with history, with origins, to some extent with
nostalgia. They are also the work of a single generation. DeLillo,
born in 1936, is the youngest of the five leading authors. The others were born
within two years of one another: Morrison in 1931, Updike in 1932, Roth and
McCarthy in 1933.
Their seniority,
needless to say, is earned - they have had plenty of time to ripen and grow -
but it is nonetheless startling to see how thoroughly American writing is
dominated by this generation. Startling in part because it reveals that the
baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics
and business, has not produced a great novel. The best writers born immediately
after the war seem almost programmatically to disdain the grand, synthesizing
ambitions of their elders (and also some of their juniors), trafficking in
irony, diffidence and the cultivation of small quirks rather than large idiosyncrasies.
Only two books whose authors were born just after the war received more than
two votes: "Housekeeping," by Marilynne
Robinson, and "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. These are
brilliant books, but they are also careful, small and precise. They do not
generalize; they document. Ann Beattie, born in 1947, is among the most gifted
and pro! lific fiction
writers of her generation, but her books are nowhere to be found on this list;
not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey's implicit
criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.
Expand beyond the
immediate parameters of this exercise, and the generational discrepancy grows
even more acute: add Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow, Anne Tyler and Cynthia Ozick,
John Irving and Joan Didion and Russell Banks and
Joyce Carol Oates and you will have a literary pantheon born almost to a person
during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Further expansion - by means of a
Wolfe here, a Mailer there - is likely to push the median age still higher.
Think back on that 1965 survey; it's hard to find an author on the list of
potential candidates much older than 50.
IS this
quantitative evidence for the decline of American letters - yet another
casualty of the 60's? Or is the American literary establishment the last
redoubt of elder-worship in a culture mad for youth? In sifting through the
responses, I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious
books by younger writers - by which I mean writers under 50 - were mentioned.
One vote each for "The Corrections" and "The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay," none for "Infinite
Jest" or "The Fortress of Solitude," a single vote for Richard
Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.
But the thing
about mythical beasts is that they don't go extinct; they evolve. The best
American fiction of the past 25 years is concerned, perhaps inordinately, with
sorting out the past, which may be its way of clearing ground for the
literature of the future. So let me end with a message to all you aspiring
hippogriff breeders out there: 2030 is just around the corner. Get to work.