The Dream of the Great American Novel
*Starred Review* In 1868, novelist John De Forest plucked the phrase “Great American Novel” from advertising chaff and made it an artistic challenge. Almost 150 years later, Buell assesses the entire trajectory of American fiction against the GAN aspiration. Cutting through the quixotic pretensions it has incubated, Buell discerns four substantive GAN templates. Hawthorne’s singular masterpiece of individual passion repressed yet intensified by communal morality, The Scarlet Letter defines the first template, exploited by Howells, Updike, and Mukherjee. The second GAN template emerges in novels of social ascent and self-invention, including Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Cather’s Song of the Lark, and James’ Portrait of a Lady. Typifying a third template, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! probe fissures—regional, racial, economic, and sexual—in the American fabric. Buell’s fourth template finds illustrations in Melville’s Moby Dick, Dos Passos’ U.S.A., and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, works reflecting the often-unstable collective that is American democracy. Rich in critical insight, Buell’s analysis locates scores of novels in its interpretive mosaic. And even in a conclusion suggesting that America’s global decline dims the prospects for its realization, Buell wonders if the GAN isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey. --Bryce Christensen