![\"The-Wire\"](\"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/The-Wire1.jpg\")
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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\u2019d let you slide without too much condemnation, but any other answer will receive immediate heckling.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that these two must be your favorite American novels. They aren\u2019t mine (though they are close), and you\u2019re free to love whatever books and authors you want. But there can\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
Wait a minute<\/em>, you might be asking. How can you be so sure? Have you read every novel there is to read?<\/em> <\/p>\n No, of course not. But I don\u2019t need to. There\u2019s 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*:<\/p>\n 1851: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Does that mean you\u2019ve read every book on this list, at least? Let me explain it like this. The Wire is the greatest television show in history. If you disagree, I will fight you. Again, I\u2019m not saying it needs to be your favorite. You can like whatever you like. But it\u2019s indisputably the most tremendous feat of narrative fiction to ever grace the medium. Nothing else even comes that close. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t be better. It\u2019s premise didn\u2019t allow it to be the Greatest American Television Show. You might enjoy it more, but that\u2019s probably because you\u2019re a racist, and it\u2019s also besides the point. We have to be objective here, not base our choices on subjective taste.<\/p>\n I have since watched all of Breaking Bad, and it was fantastic television. The final season was as compelling as anything you\u2019ll ever watch. But it still doesn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n There, I\u2019m glad that\u2019s settled.<\/p>\n Coming up, I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n *Is it a coincidence that I\u2019ll 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\u2019s too late. And while many of the others are great, only a few of them actually treat with the essence of America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019d let you slide without too much condemnation, but any other answer will receive immediate heckling. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1897,2621,2620,806,503,798,164,808,543,1250,407],"class_list":["post-3028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-america","tag-breaking-bad","tag-great-american-novel","tag-herman-melville","tag-mark-twain","tag-moby-dick","tag-television","tag-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","tag-the-great-gatsby","tag-the-wire","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3028"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3038,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions\/3038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1884: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
\n1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby<\/strong>
\n1936: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
\n1936: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind
\n1938: John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
\n1939: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
\n1951: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
\n1952: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man<\/strong>
\n1953: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
\n1955: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
\n1960: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird<\/strong>
\n1973: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
\n1975: William Gaddis’s J R
\n1985: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
\n1987: Toni Morrison’s Beloved<\/strong>
\n1996: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
\n1997: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
\n1997: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
\n1997: Don Delillo’s Underworld<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>
\nNo, though I plan to. (I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read, for your reference.) It doesn\u2019t matter. I don\u2019t need to have read them to know that they aren\u2019t Great American Novel material. <\/p>\n