A reader.


Can we finally get beyond the Great American Novel? It’s the fantasy of an earlier America, like Manifest Destiny. And yet, to read Harvard professor Lawrence Buell’s “American Literature’s Holy Grail: Franzen, DFW and the Hunt for the Great American Novel” in Salon over the weekend was to experience a cognitive dissonance, as if the shaggy monster he portrays were somehow real.
Buell’s essay is excerpted from his book “The Dream of the Great American Novel” (Harvard University Press: 584 pp., $39.95), and it’s unwieldy for a variety of reasons, not least its essential lack of inquiry. He seems to take it as a given that the Great American Novel (or GAN, as he abbreviates it) is an article of faith among most readers, whether that means “Moby-Dick” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” or something more contemporary, such as “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “Infinite Jest.”

Yes, these are all great American novels -- but as to the single, mythic Great American Novel? It doesn’t exist. How could it, when our essential sense of American-ness, of the interplay between national and personal identity, is, and ever has been, in a state of flux?

 What the Great American Novel relies on as a concept is the notion that there is some unifying experience, some core or set of values, that we as Americans all share. But as our political life daily reminds us, this is not the case. Not only that, but it misreads the fundamental function of literature, which is less about the grand defining statement than it is about empathy.

 Think about it: What makes novels such as “Huckleberry Finn” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” compelling are not their generalities but their specificity -- the tracing of particular events and interactions, the development of Huck or Jim or Tyrone Slothrop as characters, not archetypes. Certainly, these books deal with larger issues in our collective history (slavery, World War II), but at heart, they are expressions of individual consciousness.