The Great American Novel

This summer Time magazine put Jonathan Franzen on its cover. “Great American Novelist,” he was called. Lev Grossman helpfully explained:Freedom is not the kind of Great American Novel that Franzen’s predecessors wrote—not the kind Bellow and Mailer and Updike wrote. The American scene is just too complex—and too aware of its own complexity, for anything to loom that large over it ever again. But Freedom feels big in a different way [yeah, reading it feels endless—DGM], a way that not much other American fiction does right now. It doesn’t back down from the complexity. To borrow a term from the visual arts, Franzen’s writing has an enviable depth of field: it keeps a great deal in focus simultaneously.In his interview with the Guardian, Franzen tries desperately to put some daylight between himself and the phrase. “I always hated the expression anyway,” he says, ”mostly because I encountered it in stupid or sneering contexts.”

Grossman does not seem to be sneering at Franzen, although I understand what he means. By the time the phrase was first used in print 1869 [Update: the phrase had first been used a year earlier by J. W. DeForest], “the great American novel” was already described as “much-talked-of.”[1] Over a decade later, the critics were still waiting. “The ‘great American novel’ so long anxiously awaited and often prematurely announced, still lingers in the future,” said one.[2] Surveying the new American novels published so far that year—F. Marion Crawford’s Doctor Claudius, Mary Hallock Foote’s Led-Horse Claim, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen’s Daughter of the Philistines, William Henry Bishop’s House of a Merchant Prince—one literary periodical concluded that none was “the novel for which we are all waiting. We expect to have to wait considerably longer,” said the Literary World.[3]

Perhaps Lev Grossman and Time magazine just got tired of waiting. It’s pretty obvious, though, that no one—not Grossman, not Franzen, not Ed Pilkington, the Guardian’s interviewer—has any clear idea what he means by the expression. And no wonder. The expression is difficult to take seriously.

One of the few critics ever to do so was Julian Hawthorne. Although he might have protested with some justice that his father would have had already been given credit for the damn thing if he hadn’t insisted on calling his books “romances,” Hawthorne considered the claims of Henry James and W. D. Howells, who had “done more than all the rest of us to make our literature respectable during the last ten years,” but concluded:Such books as these authors have written are not the Great American Novel, because they take life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their lesser manifestations. They are the side scenes and the background of a story that has yet to be written. That story will have the interest not only of the collision of private passions and efforts, but of the great ideas and principles which characterize and animate a nation. . . . It will be American, not because its scene is laid or its characters born in the United States, but because its burden will be reaction against old tyrannies and exposure of new hypocrisies; a refutation of respectable falsehoods, and a proclamation of unsophisticated truths. Indeed, let us take heed and diligently improve our native talent, lest a day come when the Great American Novel make its appearance, but written in a foreign language, and by some author who—however purely American at heart—never set foot on the shores of the Republic.[4]Not a bad definition, actually. Perhaps it might be advanced to define a genre rather than a single volume, and perhaps it might be adequate to distinguish the greatness of certain American novels from The Portrait of a Lady to American Pastoral, but whatever else it succeeds in doing, it does not describe Freedom, or perhaps Jonathan Franzen’s novel does not meet its standards.
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[1] “Library Table,” Round Table 10 (July 3, 1869): 10. The editors believed that Harriet Beecher Stowe, “before all our other fiction-writers,” would have written it by then.

[2] Anna B. McMahan, “The New Fiction,” Our Continent 2 (Nov. 22, 1882): 618.

[2] “Wanted—An American Novel,” Literary World 14 (June 16, 1883): 192.

[4] Julian Hawthorne, “Agnosticism in American Fiction,” Princeton Review 60 (Jan.–June 1884): 13–15.