Tom's Two Cents: Some Great American Novels, and is there THE Great American Novel?

Everybody in America who writes has wanted to write, at one time or another, THE Great American Novel.  Has anybody done so?  I'm not sure, but if anyone has, it's probably Herman Melville with Moby Dick.  However, in a country as diverse as America, it's almost impossible to think of one novel as truly representative of our geography, our history, and our people, much less our "essence." There are also many great novels written by Americans but not about America.  The one I can think of right now is Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.

 
When I was in college, everyone I knew was trying to write like Hemingway.  Now I'm not at all sure that any of Hem's novels, set in Spain, Italy, Cuba, relate the American experience, whatever that may be.  Faulkner is much closer to the American Experience, but certainly his work is not representative of the Mid-west or Western Experience.  Americans in various regions have had different sorts of experiences and not all of it relates to the American experience as a whole.


Two 20th century novels of that kind do come to mind-- Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and Dreiser's American Tragedy.  The former is beautifully written but perhaps has less to say than the latter, which, unfortunately, is not so beautifully written.  This brings us to another highly complex question--what is a great novel, American or otherwise?  We really have to deal with that before we can deal with the great American novel...

Apropos of the above, Gatsby is a classic example of style over substance, whereas American Tragedy is just the reverse.  Is this all that matters?   Well, hardly!  Novels, at least the so-called classics, are stories with characters that should matter, in some sense, good or bad, to the reader.  The stories are often compelling in themselves, but foremost in my mind are the characters, and what they think, feel, say and do.  Likewise, setting may provide its own contribution, which may be integral or peripheral.

Last, but surely not least, are the elements of tone, theme and style.  How does an author handle the emotional anchor of a book?  What does he/she really have to say about life, the cosmos, the human condition, or all of these?  And finally how does he choose to say it?  All of the above should be considered to a greater or lesser degree in the determining of greatness in any novel.  But more often than not, that is not the case--rather it's the total impact that the novel makes.

Such is the case with Moby Dick, perhaps not the Great American Novel, so much as the greatest novel yet written by an American.   Epic in scope, brilliant and Lear-like in its conception of its protagonist, Captain Ahab, compelling in its narrative, and so complex in its thematic interpretation that even today readers and scholars scratch their collective heads over its meaning, Moby Dick remains at the top of a very selective heap, but in the last analysis, does it really focus on the American Experience?  I'm not sure.

I do know that if you divide the above into certain areas or classifications, such as the American Experience in the great American West, you would certainly have to give very high marks to McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, one of the finest American novels I've read, though it has to do with our past rather than our present.  Nonetheless, it meets all my requirements for a great novel and then some!

The more I think about this, the more I would agree that there are certain restrictive categories that great American novels fall into, and that there is really no one novel that says it all.  Even Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, perhaps the two finest novelists of all time, couldn't grasp hold of the Russian Experience or Essence in one novel, and in some quirky ways, I find our two countries similar--not politically of course, but culturally and geographically.

As much as I would like to say that War and Peace says it all, it obviously doesn't speak to all people, not even all literary people.

Anyway, what in my estimation are the Great American novels?  At least up to 1950--I can't go much beyond that in ANY field of the arts--I would say:

The Scarlet Letter--our earliest great literary work
Moby Dick--need I say more?
The Adventures of Huck Finn--a literary avalanche
Portrait of a Lady--American in subtle ways
An American Tragedy--great in spite of itself
The Sound and the Fury--a precursor of the Moderns and Beyond? 

I don't feel qualified to say, given my biases!