Credit: Upsplash
The United States is where I was born, where I grew up, and maybe where I’ll die.
The US exists because its founders held the ideals of individual liberties to be incompatible with tyranny. As a result of this breaking free, it had to forge its own identity. Over the centuries, it has been a melting pot for immigrants of all types. Many have moved here for better opportunities and freedoms. Of course, it hasn’t been all good. In creating this new identity, it did so on stolen land, genocided native peoples, enslaved tens of millions, continued to discriminate against them even after their liberation, and has failed to live up to its stated ideals time and gain. Despite all this, I remain optimistic about the American struggle to live up to what it wants itself to be. It embodies the Solzhenitsyn dyad represented in the famous quote: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Nowhere is this more explicit than in the Great American Novel (GAN). The GAN, a term coined by the 19thC American writer John William de Forest, “paints the American soul” and provides a “picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." In short, it’s a time capsule - but not just of simple things, such as how people talked, what people did, what they wore, and so on. It tells us we are: what we care about, what we’re willing to die and live for; it encapsulates the human struggle toward something greater. That is, in a nutshell, the human condition.
The following is not an exhaustive list. There are many other books I have not read. But these are my favorite that also fit the category. For fun, I ranked them, according to how well they capture the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the US story, the story of us.
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz
This is the tale of an overweight Dominican-American otaku named Oscar. He yearns to fall in love. But he’s caught in the fukú, a multi-general curse that plagues the de Léon family, perhaps originating with the first arrival of Europeans in the so-called New World, a moment that ushered in the literal decimation and extinction of native peoples across the Americas.
It’s a fantastically written work, one of my favorite contemporary novels. Your heart breaks for the naïve but brilliant Oscar. But how well does it fit the category?
Oscar Wao doesn’t show up as much as the others here in other GAN lists. Why?
Traditionally, we’ve had some deep-seated assumptions about what it means to be American and, thus, who should write a GAN and who such a book would be about. It’s an old criticism of English lit and how it’s been taught: too many dead white guys. But the US has changed and so has the GAN. I find no fault in Oscar Wao being an immigrant story. Such is the American story.
Oscar Wao is also partly a historical text, documenting key moments in the history of the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime, as told through the lives of the older characters and through many of the book’s footnotes. To be fair, it’s hard to separate the history of America from the history of Latin America, especially the Caribbean, given extensive American influence and interference, thanks to the wonderfully paradoxical Roosevelt Corollary. More, history is hard to separate from the present in any meaningful way. So, to me, despite differences with others on this list, Oscar Wao qualifies as a GAN. These differences, however, are also why I ranked the narrative 6 and not higher.
There’s another reason - the magical realism. In the story, there are a few supernatural elements, the fukú; the Faceless Man; and Zafa, the talking mongoose. This believable blending of real life with magic is a Latin American coinage. It works beautifully in the book, mixing Oscar’s science fiction and comic books with his real-life adventures and struggles, adding depth and uniqueness. I love the work. I am a bit biased, to be sure. My mother’s side of the family is from Quisqueya; I know many Oscars, Lolas, and Belis; and I love science fiction and magic realism. Despite this, ideally, I think a GAN should anchor itsself a bit more solidly in the US and its traditions.
Still, and more importantly, Oscar Wao adroitly captures the immigrant struggle to free themselves and their family from the fetters of the past, to start a new hopeful generation and break the cycle.
5. Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville
This narrative is told by someone who prefers to be called Ishmael, an introspective crew member aboard the Pequod, a whaling vessel doomed in a revenge quest against the whale that bit off part of the leg of the ship’s captain, the monomaniacal Ahab. The tome is a mishmash of philosophy, religion, adventure, history, marine biology, and more. Not since Laurence Stern’s Tristam Shandy has a novel been this convoluted and long and weird and ineffable and - yet - kinda great. It’s almost post-modern before there was such a thing; it’s pre-post-modern.
When I first read it, I felt like it could’ve used some editing. But then it wouldn’t be Moby-Dick. Like the US, it is what it it: an amazingly amorphous collage of synthesized contradiction.
Moby-Dick is also a part of the American Renaissance, a literary movement that ran from about 1830 until about the end of the Civil War. It romanticized nationalism and generally called on America to live up to its principles.
The ship is composed of a motley crew with different faiths, tongues, colors, and backgrounds. Along the journey, over time, barriers erase. The harpooners are all minority figures: Queequeg, Polynesian; Tashtego, Native American; and Daggoo, African. Their position of harpooner disrupts traditional race narratives about white supremacy. In fact, Ishmael’s diatribe against whiteness in Chapter 42 (“The Whiteness of the Whale”) examines the complexities of such traditional narratives. Elizabeth Shultz, retired U of Kansas Professor of English, writes in “Visualizing Race: Images of Moby-Dick,” an article in the Melville-centered journal Leviathan: “Analyzing his terror of whiteness, Ishmael realizes that in addition to royalty, nobility, innocence, and benignity, the color also signifies death, aberration, desolation, alienation, and, most horrific of all, utter nihilism, utter meaninglessness.” Fitting for the voyage itself since thus is revenge - a pointless effort in the end.
In brief, to quote Childish Gambino, who’s also written about the complexities of race and contradictions of this country, “This is America.”
4. Catcher in the Rye (1951) by JD Salinger
This is the story of Holden Caulfield, a young man attending a boarding school in Pennsylvania who gets expelled for poor academic performance, loses a fight over a girl, and decides to avoid going home until Wednesday, a few days away, when his parents will have received notice of his expulsion.
He is young, lost, and searches for meaning. What he finds, though, is a superficial world. He’s always looking in the wrong places. For example, one incident sees him pursue company (not sex) with a prostitute, who later gets her pimp, who then assaults Holden.
Many early settlers came here and saw empty, seemingly endless plains before them (largely due to genocide). The land held promise. It was, to them, a new world, one that required a new government, a new people, and a new way of life. In the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the American journalist Sebastian Junger recounts the tale of early settlements who were either kidnapped by native tribes or left European settlements voluntarily to live among the Native Americans. Most preferred life among the Native American to the fetters of puritanical society. Even when recaptured by other settlers and returned to Western civilization, there were those who escaped again to rejoin tribal society. Point is, meaning didn’t just show up where ever you are. Sometimes, Americans had to go and find it.
Faced with nihilism, Holden plans to abandon everything, to run away from the phonies. It’s a tear-jerking moment when his 10-year-old sister Phoebe shows up to meet him with a suitcase, ready to leave it all behind and accompany her big brother. To Holden, she represents innocence. It’s something he wants to protect in her. In the end, he decides not to leave but to stay and make things better.
The deceptively simple tale showcases a moment in time, the mid-to-late 1940s. There was, as there has been in many countries, a desire to preserve what is sacred. We saw a lot change in the ’60s. It had its antecedents in the ’40s and before. While this desire to protect innocence, to see the contemporary world as tainting what one deems as pure, some innate human nature or virtue, is more or less universal, there is something about the US, a country that has seen every ill intent manifested, that forever struggles to keep itself from falling.
3. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald
This is not my number one, though it often shows up as such in many of these lists. And for good reason.
It’s a damn near perfect book. The writing may be a little flowery for a few modern readers. But the themes, despite the hundred years that have passed, are timeless. Prime among them is the idea of recapturing the past. Gatsby longs to rekindle a past flame he had with Daisy. But five years have gone by since they last say each other, and she’s now married with children with Tom Buchanan, the old money to Gatsby’s nouveau.
Gatsby embodies the achievement of the American Dream; a poor South Dakotan with no name (né James Gats) reinvents himself and accumulates fantastic wealth, with the help of a few underworld figures. Though not an immigrant, per se, he does what many immigrants strive to do. He creates a new identity for himself and climbs out of poverty.
We also see society, its hopes and faults, in the 1920’s, many of which persist, even if we’ve made progress, chiefly racism and sexism. While the novel exposes Daisy’s plight as a woman, to be treated with equality and dignity, as well as Tom’s white supremacy, it doesn’t seem to find fault in its stereotypical depiction of Meyer Wolfsheim. According to the accounts of “Frances Kroll, a Jewish woman and secretary to Fitzgerald, . . . Fitzgerald was hurt by accusations of antisemitism and . . . [claimed Wolfsheim] merely ‘fulfilled a function in the story and [his depiction] had nothing to do with race or religion.’ ” I don’t see the need in the stereotype. Many 1920s Americans were anti-semitic and few questioned white supremacy. So, we can say that, for its time, Gatsby was ethically progressive.
Despite its tragic ending, we that, as Nick states, “Gatsby turned out all right in the end.” Gatsby, who hid his identity for so long, afraid of being judged, was exposed by Tom, broken in front of everyone, killed by Wilson, and yet - and yet - turned out to be a great, after all.
America is also great, if flawed and failing at times to be better.
2. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
I was hesitant about including this novel due to its use of the supernatural. The supernatural feels like almost another category of story. With Oscar Wao, the magic realism is part of why, despite my admiration for the story, I only rank it 6. But it’s a masterpiece. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993.
What’s also different about Beloved, and shared by Oscar Wao, is that the story is authored by a minority - what’s more, by a woman. History has been told by the victors, and this biases what we read and come to know. As stated, the GAN is a category that features mostly white men. My own list bears out this bias; I can only partly blame my formal education, which focused on such writers. So, Toni Morrison’s inclusion helps the list be more balanced and diverse.
Truly, it’s hard to imagine America, as great and diverse as it has become, without the immeasurable contributions from African Americans. In a literal sense, they built this country. So, their story is our story.
Beloved takes place in the mid-to-late 19th Century. It deals with the psychological and physical trauma left in slavery’s wake. Sethe, a mother and former slave, lives with a virtual “tree” on her back, the many scars she carries from the whippings she received. She tries to move on, to find love in Paul D, another former slave from the same plantation, the so-called Sweet Home. But her current home is haunted by the spirit of her murdered eldest daughter, as if the spirit of slavery and hatred and cruelty still besieges them.
The heart-wrenching moment in the book is based on real life. To understand this, one must first know the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave human traffickers, racist, and torturers the legal authority to kidnap their escaped victims. It’s one of the most evil laws the US has ever had. Consider for a moment how you think such a reunion likely would have gone? What would it have been like to have been recaptured and brought back into the bloody hands of a personal tyrant? Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, having fled Kentucky and made a new life for herself in Ohio, after having been found by US Marshals, barricaded her family inside. As they approached, she did the unthinkable. She killed her own daughter. If you find it difficult to comprehend, perhaps you lack either imagination or real knowledge of slavery. It was not a life worth living. Consider the many unrelenting slave revolts in the US, destined to be put down eventually and their instigators surely to be tortured and killed. I can not fault her.
In Beloved, as with The Catcher, there is an innocence that needs to be protected and a love that overcomes. America has fought to free itself from its demons, literally via the Civil War. Morrison sheds light on the special case of the African-American plight, which has borne deeper scars than others. I think we still struggle with this dark past.
1. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
It’s hard to argue The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is not a great book. It won the National Book Award (1939) and the Pulitzer Prize (1940). Steinbeck also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Ok, I like Steinbeck.
The book is set during the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 and lasting into about the start of WWII, it was one of the most severe economic downturns in American history. US GDP fell by about 15%. For comparison, US GDP fell by about 5.1% cumulatively during the recent Great Recession. The period is characterized by widespread unemployment and extreme poverty.
Grapes of Wrath is about the Joads, poor Oklahoman tenant farmers, who were hit hard by economic hardship caused by the Dust Bowl, a dire agricultural crisis centered on the Great Plains, coinciding with the Great Depression. Severe dust storms, soil erosion, and droughts were common. The Joads leave everything behind for California, which holds an almost Edenic quality to the desperate, jobless Joads and other fleeing “Okies.”
They form a mass of desperate families. Along the way, they experience exploitation and discrimination. To fight these social injustices, the characters find resilience and dignity in solidarity. The book exposes exploitative capitalist practices. Many of the characters, particularly Jim Casy, a doubtful preacher, find solace in some socialist ideals. (As an aside, during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Steinbeck complained of being audited every year by the IRS. A faction of the government suspected he was a communist. I don’t think so. He just cared a lot about working class people.)
Yes, one of the GANs, and my number one, promotes some socialist ideas. To me, part of what it means to be American is to criticize your country, not because it sucks or one is unpatriotic, as some oversimplifications from the right-wing tend to say, but because one wants it to be better, because there is still hope. Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, MLK Jr, the Founding Fathers - all of them fought against injustice because they felt that the country shall overcome one day.
The storytelling is masterful. The scenes, the characters, the dialogue all come to life. It’s not a story you easily forget. You see yourself in these Okies. We’re all Okies at heart, trying to find a better life, fighting off life’s slings and arrows through love and family and purpose.
Conclusion
America, despite its greatness, was and is and will likely always be flawed. It has its origins in genocide, its past in racist enslavement, segregation, and discrimination. Currently, there is economic injustice and systemic bias. As human history has shown, it’s a slow crawl to learn to walk and then to run. We will fall and cry and stub our toe. A lot. We will go back sometimes. Sometimes, we’ll be afraid to stand at all. But this young nation will grow up tall one day and move past the past. That is my hope. That is the American story.