The Decline of the Great American Novel?

As commonly used the term "Great American Novel" did not denote simply a great novel by an American, but also a great novel about America--a novel where the story is the big story about the country, namely where it had been, where it is now, where it is going in a way that captures the spirit of the age. Of course, consensus about such things is always elusive, with the result that people can differ greatly about that, with the works of Mark Twain an excellent example. The Establishment view is that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a Great American Novel, but that view has never seemed to me very satisfying. The narrowness of its scope apart, the story is much more of the past than the future--a novel published in 1884 about the 1840s--and so less a story of where America really was, or even where it had been, than a piece of national mythmaking, not least in its romance of "the road," and its hero's ultimately heeding the old injunction "Go West, Young Man." Indeed, it seems to me a far better candidate among Twain's works is his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner The Gilded Age in its having at its heart the comedy and tragedy of the delusion, foolhardiness, corruption and messiness of life in a time and place where everyone was out to get rich quick through a piece of the Colossal Land Grab that was that much-romanticized westward movement, which down to its title rang so true that it actually gave the period of America's history after the Civil War the name by which we still know it today--sufficiently true, indeed, as to make those who much prefer Huckleberry Finn's ride down the Mississippi on a raft uncomfortable.

Of course, even if we disagree about what should be counted as a Great American Novel the point is that those who so disagree at least have in common some notion of a standard by which they are judging--and hold in common, too, the view that a book actually can live up to such a standard. I suspect fewer think so today, pointing to society's more fragmented, more conflicted, state where it seems that rather than "I, too, am America!" those who have been marginalized would rather say "I am America--and you are not! Not anymore!" but for my part I think this confuses the fashionable view of things with reality. Even if our cynically and evasively subjectivity, difference, fragmentation and muddle-worshipping postmodernists will not admit it, I think there still is a national story, and indeed one not all that hard to discern because it is the same story that writers like Dreiser and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Lewis were telling so ably a hundred years ago, namely the crisis of the country, its society, its system that was ever less separable from a bigger world-crisis, the very same one as that crisis was never resolved such that the 1920s look all too familiar from the standpoint of the 2020s. An era of technological change promising great leaps in productivity, and a few making vast fortunes at one end of the spectrum, which they flaunt in the most arrogant and garish manner, as far, far more of the public face immiseration at the other, not least because of how the idiocies and irresponsibilities and outright criminality in the world of High Finance wreaked havoc with their lives. An era of sex-crazed culture war pitting religious, nativist "traditionalists" against secular cosmopolitans attempting to deal with modern realities in a fight characterized by deluded Puritanism and vicious indulgence and stupid hypocrisy about all of it, and brazen hysterical bigotry which has minorities facing a resurgence of suspicion and hatred and the door slammed in the immigrant's face as cowardice, conformism, mental stultification get the upper hand. An era of, in the face of nothing but mediocrity, corruption and worse in high places, a thin layer of complacency and self-satisfaction overlaying great unease which the intelligent, alas much more prone to cynicism than any other mood, know cannot last, that the disaster so many of those in the elite so smugly wrote off as impossible is just around the corner--disaster that a century ago saw society's "leaders" respond with half-hearted stopgaps they soon abandoned, settling nothing really, indeed just kicking the problems down the road as new ones emerged, such that the tragedy of the past is being repeated today as an extremely unfunny farce that in its conclusion may show us a brand of comedy darker even than that earlier tragedy.

Still, even if there is in that crisis, that same never-resolved crisis of our economic and social and political life at home and globally, the national story, the potential for new Great American Novels, it is harder than ever to picture them being written, published, widely read in that way that would befit works for which such claims would be meaningful. After all, it is hard to picture any of the sort of people in a position to put out a book with a major publisher (if you're thinking about submitting to a slush pile you're not one of them) seriously trying to write such a Novel given the social stratum they hail from, the education and acculturation they have with all its delusions and prejudices. Hard to picture it being accepted, and given a decent launch into the post-apocalyptic hellscape of the current Literary Market Place--because they can't give it a decent launch with the cultural gatekeepers having for Job One fierce opposition to any such thing, and because discretionary reading of long-form fiction, let alone such reading of contemporary serious fiction, an ever rarer event for the broad public. Perhaps not so rare as "reading Latin poetry in the original," but rare enough that even if a Great American Novel really did capture the spirit of America, America would not even notice, with all that implies for what the achievement would really mean in the end.