The Big Read: Can a Single Book Sum Up a Nation?

Whenever my father used to see me intently hunched over my grade-school English homework, he would say, “Looks like you’re working on the Great American Novel,” then pad off to read the newspaper. You don’t hear much these days about the GAN (as Henry James nicknamed it), but that doesn’t mean writers don’t still quest after this literary grail—or will-o’-the-wisp. Poets may dream that through their work they will achieve lasting fame—“Non omnis moriar,” as Horace declares in one of his greatest odes. But to capture in a few hundred pages the richness and complexity and sheer cussedness of American life seems an almost impossible ambition. By contrast, a single line—such as John William Burgon’s “A rose-red city half as old as time”—can be enough to confer poetic immortality.

At the beginning of his densely written but magisterial study, The Dream of the Great American Novel, Lawrence Buell lists some of the general requirements for any electable GAN candidate. He settles on four possible “scripts”:

Perhaps the surest guarantee of GAN candidacy is to have been subjected again and again to a series of memorable imitations and reinventions in whatever genre or media, thereby giving the text a kind of master narrative status whether or not it set out to be one.

He points to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as such a book, frequently referred to, pastiched, and parodied.

Script number two … centers on the life story of a socially representative figure (conventionally male, but not necessarily so), who strives whether successfully or not to transform himself or herself from obscurity to prominence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are examples of this type.

Script three … I call the romance of the divide, or rather divides, plural—books from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and beyond, whose plots turn on issues of sectional and/or ethnoracial division. Often they dramatize those divisions through a multigenerational family history or a scene of cross-divide interpersonal intimacy.

Script four is best showcased by compendious meganovels that assemble heterogeneous cross-sections or characters imagined as social microcosms or vanguards. These are networked loosely or tightly as the case may be, and portrayed as acting and interacting in relation to epoch-making public events or crises, in such a way as to constitute an image of ‘democratic’ promise or dysfunction.

Buell’s examples of this category include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy.

Initially, the nineteenthcentury passion for defining and creating “national” novels arose from what Buell dubs “cultural legitimation anxiety.” Early attempts at the GAN aimed to portray the distinctive character of the young United States, often celebrating Yankee virtues, such as drive and know-how, but sometimes revealing how far the country had fallen away from the foundational ideals of liberty and equality. These days, of course, we have grown leery of “exceptionalist self-imaginings” or grand unitary visions of our ethnically and culturally diverse society. According to critic Mark McGurl, the contemporary American writer often “‘disaffiliates from the empirical nation … in order to affiliate with a utopian sub-nation, whether that be African-or Asian-or Mexican-’ or Native.” Buell argues back, however, that American life has always been characterized by “the tension between synthesis and particularism.” Even the lack of glue, “the perceived (non)relation between fractious parts has itself been one of the drivers of GAN thinking from the start.”

Buell, as these quotations should make clear, has thought hard and carefully about his subject. He is, after all, a distinguished (if now emeritus) professor of American literature at Harvard, admired by some of the shrewdest scholars of our literature, including Robert D. Richardson (biographer of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James) and Philip F. Gura, who dedicated his last book, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, to Buell. Nonetheless, Buell...