The Great American Novel

Long time readers will know that I accept only two possible answers to the question of what is the Great American Novel: The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick. If you were to respond with The Great Gatsby, I’d let you slide without too much condemnation, but any other answer will receive immediate heckling.

That’s not to say that these two must be your favorite American novels. They aren’t mine (though they are close), and you’re free to love whatever books and authors you want. But there can’t be a serious argument that any other works fully capture the American experience while at the same time having something very profound to say about all humanity as exceptionally as these two works.

Wait a minute, you might be asking. How can you be so sure? Have you read every novel there is to read?

No, of course not. But I don’t need to. There’s obviously going to be a short list of works that could qualify as the Great American Novel. Here is the list of nominees, according to Wikipedia*:

1851: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
1884: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
1936: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
1936: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind
1938: John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
1939: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
1951: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
1952: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
1953: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
1955: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
1960: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
1973: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
1975: William Gaddis’s J R
1985: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
1987: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
1996: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
1997: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
1997: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
1997: Don Delillo’s Underworld

Does that mean you’ve read every book on this list, at least?

No, though I plan to. (I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read, for your reference.) It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to have read them to know that they aren’t Great American Novel material.

Let me explain it like this. The Wire is the greatest television show in history. If you disagree, I will fight you. Again, I’m not saying it needs to be your favorite. You can like whatever you like. But it’s indisputably the most tremendous feat of narrative fiction to ever grace the medium. Nothing else even comes that close. It’s the Great American Television Show. Not only does it have compelling stories, with unforgettable characters, it also captures life in America in a way very few works of art ever have.

So when people started talking about Breaking Bad after the first couple of seasons, and they were saying it was better than the Wire, I scoffed. I knew it couldn’t be better. It’s premise didn’t allow it to be the Greatest American Television Show. You might enjoy it more, but that’s probably because you’re a racist, and it’s also besides the point. We have to be objective here, not base our choices on subjective taste.

I have since watched all of Breaking Bad, and it was fantastic television. The final season was as compelling as anything you’ll ever watch. But it still doesn’t touch season four of The Wire, nor does it change the fact I knew this before I even saw it. A show about a guy deciding to deal meth because he has cancer is not going to replace a show that deals with the entire fabric of a city as the iconic American television show. Which show would you give to your Norwegian friend to show them what urban America is really like?

There, I’m glad that’s settled.

Coming up, I’ll be going into greater depth on both Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, examining what makes them Great American Novel material and what we can learn from them today.

*Is it a coincidence that I’ll allow for only the first three books on this list? No. It just aligns with the fact I believe that to qualify as the Great American Novel, it had to be written while America was ascendant. By the seventies, it’s too late. And while many of the others are great, only a few of them actually treat with the essence of America.

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