One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2018 is to read at least one candidate for the title of “Great American Novel” (GAN) each week. I recognize, of course, that the notion of “the”–a single, distinct, totalizing–Great American Novel is an impossibility. Americans are too disparate and difference-inducing to be subsumed within a single text. Nonetheless, novels can speak to elements of the American experience in ways to which many Americans can relate. Novels, too, like all great art, can capture the events and moods of a moment, shaping our dreams and inviting us to reexamine our social condition. Laurence Buell, author of The Dream of the Great American Novel, argues that GANs follow four scripts:
One, illustrated by The Scarlet Letter, is the adaptation of the novel’s story-line by later writers, often in ways that are contrary to the original author’s own design. Other aspirants, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, engage the American Dream of remarkable transformation from humble origins. A third script, seen in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Beloved, is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions. Finally, mega-novels from Moby-Dick to Gravity’s Rainbow feature assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy.
While I’m not sure that I agree with Buell’s typology or even that GAN prospects can be so neatly categorized, I’ve come up with a reading list for 2015 that includes many of Buell’s suggestions. Newer works are also included, since canon ≠ GAN. I’ve managed to select a novel for every decade from 1850 to the 2010s, making this one of the more temporally representative GAN lists you’re likely to find. Here’s hoping the depth of the narratives matches the breadth of the books I’ve chosen. What do you think of the idea of the GAN? Am I missing a novel that you feel encapsulates America, or aspects thereof, in a way that shouldn’t be missed?
GAN Books
1. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (1851)
2. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1885)
3. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut (1963)
4. American Pastoral – Philip Roth (1997)
5. Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner (1929)
6. Freedom – Jonathan Franzen (2010)
7. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)
8. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (1960)
9. On the Road – Jack Kerouac (1957)
10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey (1962)
11. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004)
12. A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley (1991)
13. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison (1952)
14. Native Son – Richard Wright (1940)
15. The Scarlett Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
16. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (1939)
17. Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann (2009)
18. Rabbit, Run – John Updike (1960)
19. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
20. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
21. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon (1973)
22. Beloved – Toni Morrison (1987)
23. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)
24. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon (1997)
25. Light In August – William Faulkner (1932)
26. Underworld – Don Delillo (1997)
27. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon (2000)
28. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy (1985)
29. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (1951)
30. J R – William Gaddis (1975)
31. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry (1985)
32. Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow (1953)
33. Absalom, Absalom – William Faulkner (1936)
34. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (1936)
35. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (1961)
36. Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson (2007)
37. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow (1975)
38. Them – Joyce Carol Oates (1969)
39. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (1953)
40. Empire Falls – Richard Russo (2001)
41. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan (2010)
42. Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien (1978)
43. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane (1895)
44. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (1966)
45. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (1868)
46. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton (1905)
47. My Antonia – Willa Cather (1918)
48. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser (1905)
49. Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
50. The Round House – Louise Erdrich (2012)
51. Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich (1984/2009)
52. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
GAN Books – 25 More (If Time Permits)
1. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (1980)
2. The Color Purple – Alice Walker (1985)
3. USA – John Dos Passos (1930-1936)
4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (2007)
5. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner (1971)
6. Rabbit Is Rich – John Updike (1981)
7. Continental Drift – Russell Banks (1985)
8. Independence Day – Richard Ford (1995)
9. The Known World – Edward P. Jones (2003)
10. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt (2013)
11. Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout (2008)
12. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
13. Netherland – Joseph O’Neill (2012)
14. The Echo Maker – Richard Powers (2006)
15. All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy (1992)
16. The Counterlife – Philip Roth (1986)
17. Rabbit at Rest – John Updike (1990)
18. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser (1925)
19. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis (1920)
20. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (2012)
21. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
22. Bluebeard – Kurt Vonnegut (1987)
23. Swamplandia – Karen Russell (2011)
24. The Human Stain – Philip Roth (2000)
25. Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth (1995)
Kris Coffield 