The Great American Novel is the great superlative of American life. We’ve had our poets, composers, philosophers, and painters, too, but no medium matches the spirit of our country like the novel does. The novel is grand, ambitious, limitless in its imagined possibility. It strains towards the idea that all of life may be captured in a story, just as we strain through history to make self-evident truths real on earth.
So, when you set out to debate “the great American novel,” the stakes are high.
We asked nine English scholars to choose one novel as the greatest our country has ever produced. Of course, we explained, the real goal is to get a good conversation going and we don’t really expect to elevate one novel above all the rest. But they took their assignments seriously anyway. You’ll see some familiar names below. Ishmael, Huck, Lily Bart, and Humbert Humbert are all there. But so is Don Corleone, and Lambert Strether, and a gifted blues singer named Ursa.
We hope you enjoy the conversation, and if you disagree with our scholars’ choices — which we assume you will — please offer your own nominations in the comments section.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland, Florida State University
How could anyone argue that Huck Finn is the Great American Novel? That racist propaganda? Repeatedly banned ever since it was written for all manner of “inappropriate” actions, attitudes, and name-calling? Yet it is precisely the novel’s tale of racism and its history of censorship that make it a Great American Novel contender. A land defined and challenged by racism, America struggles with how to understand and move beyond its history. Censor it? Deny it? Rewrite it? Ignore it? Twain confronts American history head-on and tells us this: White people are the problem.
Hemingway was right when he said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Hemingway was wrong when he continued, “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.” For if we stop where Hemingway instructs, we may read the actual wish of many whites – that someone else would take their “black problem” or their “Indian problem” or their “immigrant problem” away – but we miss Twain’s most important critique: White men like Tom Sawyer will forever manipulate the Huck Finns of the world.
Huck and Jim (never named “Nigger Jim” in the book, by the way) make good progress at working their way out of the hierarchy into which they were born until Tom shows up. Then Huck does unbelievably ridiculous things in the section Hemingway calls “cheating.” Why? Huck does so to keep himself out of jail and to save Jim, sure. But he also does so because Tom tells him he must. In spite of all he has learned about Jim; in spite of his own moral code; in spite of his own logic, Huck follows Tom’s orders. This is Twain’s knock-out punch. Tom leads because he wants an adventure; Huck follows because he wants to “do right.” In a democracy, shouldn’t we better choose our leaders?
If the Great American Novel both perceptively reflects its time and challenges Americans to do better, Huck Finn deserves the title. Rendering trenchant critiques on every manifestation of whiteness, Twain reminds us that solving racism requires whites to change.
The Ambassadors
Stuart Burrows, Brown University, and author of A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography
The Ambassadors is famously difficult, so much so that the critic Ian Watt once wrote an entire essay about its opening paragraph. James’s mannered, labyrinthine sentences are as far from the engaging, colloquial style associated with the American novel as it’s possible to imagine; his hero, Lambert Strether, wouldn’t dream of saying “call me Lambert.” The great American subject, race, is completely absent. And although Strether, like Huck and Holden and countless other American heroes, is an innocent abroad, he is middle-aged — closer in years to Herzog and Rabbit than Nick or Janie. Strether’s wife and, most cruelly, his young son, are long dead, which makes his innocence a rather odd thing. But then there really is no-one like Strether. For Strether has imagination, perhaps more imagination than any American protagonist before or since.
“Nothing for you will ever come to the same thing as anything else,” a friend tells him at the start of his adventures. It’s a tribute to Strether’s extraordinary ability to open himself to every experience on its own terms. Strether is “one of those on whom nothing is lost” — James’s definition of what the writer should ideally be. The price to be paid for this openness is naivety: Strether — sent on a trip to Paris by his fiancée, the formidable Mrs. Newsome, to bring her son home to Massachusetts — is first deceived, then admonished, and finally betrayed.
But none of this robs him of his golden summer, his “second wind.” James dryly notes that Strether comes “to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it.”
Here is what his imagination does to the Luxembourg Gardens: “[a] vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.”
At the height of his adventures Strether finds himself at a bohemian garden party, which prompts him to exclaim to a group of young Americans: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” Strether insists that this is precisely what he has failed to have — he has no career, no money, and by this point in the novel, no fiancée. Yet the only way it makes sense to say that Strether has not had his life is if we think of him as having given his life to us — his perceptions, his humor, his sense of possibility. What other life could one want?
Corregidora
Zita C. Nunes, University of Maryland, and author of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas
John William DeForest is credited with the first use of the term, “The Great American Novel,” in an 1868 article in The Nation. Having taken a survey of American novels and judged them either too grand, “belonging to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality,” or too small and of mere regional interest, DeForest finally settles on Uncle Tom’s Cabin as nearest to deserving the label.
He describes it as a portrait of American life from a time when it was easy to have American novels. It would seem that this time was characterized by the experience of slavery, which remains to this day as a legacy, leading me to think that our time is no harder. Given this context for the emergence of the idea of The Great American Novel, I nominate Corregidora, a novel by Gayl Jones, as a wonderful candidate for this distinction.
A difficult work, it has been well received by critics since its initial publication in 1975, who praised the innovative use of the novel form, which engaged a broad sweep of literary and popular language and genres. But what makes this novel stand out in terms of DeForest’s criteria is how all of this is put in the service of exploring what it is to be American in the wake of slavery. The novel traces the story of enslavement, first in Africa, then Brazil, and, finally, to a kind of freedom in the United States, passed down through four generations of mothers and daughters. As an allegory for the United States as part of America, this novel explores the secrets that help explain our mysterious ties to one another. Until Ursa finds the courage to ask “how much was hate and how much was love for [the slavemaster] Corregidora,” she is unable to make sense of all of the ambivalent stories of love and hate, race and sex, past and present, that interweave to make us what she calls “the consequences” of the historic and intimate choices that have been made.
DeForest tellingly is unable to name a single Great American Novel in his essay. Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes closest, he claims, since the material of the work was in many respects “admirable,” although “the comeliness of form was lacking.” I sympathize with DeForest’s reluctance to actually name The Great American Novel, but if I have to name one that is comely in form and admirable in material, it would be Corregidora.
The Godfather
Tom Ferraro, Duke University, and author of Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America
Ahab rages at nature, resisting resource capital, and is destroyed; Gatsby accrues gangster wealth, in a delusion of class-transcending love, and is destroyed. Neither produces children. Of America’s mad masters, only Vito Corleone triumphs, in money and blood.
The Godfather is the most read adult novel in history and the most influential single act of American creativity of the second half of the American century: nothing else comes close. It provided the blueprint for the movies, which resurrected Hollywood. It tutored The Sopranos, which transformed television. And we all know who “The Godfather” is, even if we’ve never read a word of the book. How did Puzo do it?
Puzo’s Southern Italian imagination turned a visionary ethnic family man into a paradigm of capitalism wrapped in the sacred rhetoric of paternal beneficence. This interplay of family and business creates a double crisis of succession: first, Don Vito’s failure to recognize the emergent drug market, which precipitates the assassination attempt (a “hostile take over bid,” Mafia-style); and second, of the Americanization of his gifted son Michael (who studies math at Dartmouth, enlists in the Marines, and takes a WASP fiancée), which puts the sacred Sicilian family structure at risk. Both tensions are resolved in a single stroke: the Return of the Prodigal Son, who is re-educated in the old ways of love and death, and ascends to his father’s capitalist-patriarchal throne.
The Godfather was written in 1969 and can be read as a dramatic response to a pivotal moment in American history. Puzo substituted the Corleones’ tactical genius for our stumbling intervention in Vietnam; he traded the family’s homosocial discipline and female complicity for women’s liberation; and he offered the dream of successful immigrant solidarity in place of the misconstrued threat of civil rights and black power.
Yet like any profound myth narrative, The Godfather reads as well now as then. Its fantasy of perfect succession, the son accomplishing on behalf of the father what the father could not bear to do, is timeless. And Puzo’s ability to express love and irony simultaneously is masterful: the mafia is our greatest romance and our greatest fear, for it suspends our ethical judgments and binds us to its lust for power and vengeance. Of course, our immigrant entrepreneurs, violent of family if not of purpose, keep coming. Even Puzo’s out-sized vulgarities illuminate, if you can hear their sardonic wit.
After Puzo, none of America’s epic stories, Ahab’s or Gatsby’s, Hester Prynne’s or Invisible Man’s, reads exactly the same. And that is exactly the criterion of T.S. Eliot’s admission to the “great tradition.” The Godfather teaches us to experience doubly. To enjoy the specter of Sicilian otherness (an old-world counterculture, warm and sexy even in its violence) while suspecting the opposite, that the Corleones are the hidden first family of American capitalism. In Puzo’s omerta, the ferocious greed of the mafia is all our own.
Invisible Man
Joseph Fruscione, George Washington University, and author of Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry
It is Invisible Man. No, it was not written by a Nobel Laureate or Pulitzer Prize winner, nor has it been around for centuries. It is a novel of substance, of layers and riffs. It might even be said to be the greatest American novel.
The greatness of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) comes from being many things to many readers. A racial epic. A bildungsroman in the form of a dramatic monologue. A rich psychological portrait of racial identity, racism, history, politics, manhood, and conflicted personal growth. An elusive story of and by an elusive, nameless narrator. A jazz-like play on literature, music, society, memory, and the self. A product of a voracious reader and writer. Somehow, it is all of these, perhaps one of the reasons it netted the National Book Award over The Old Man and the Sea and East of Eden.
“But what did I do to be so blue?,” Invisible asks at the end of its famous prologue. “Bear with me.”
And bear with him we do, for 25 chapters and nearly 600 pages. At moments, Invisible shows the kind of reach and attention to detail that Ellison did as a craftsman in writing — revising, rewriting, and saving draft after draft of his works. Invisible’s Harlem “hole” isn’t just brightly lit; it has exactly 1,369 lights, with more to come. He obsessively details his encounters with his grandfather (“It was he who caused the trouble”), the racist audience of a battle royal, his college administrators, members of the party, and the many people he meets in the South, New York, and elsewhere.
Another element of the novel’s greatness could be its metaphorical sequel — that is, Ellison’s attempt at recapturing its scope, ambitiousness, and importance in the second novel he composed over the last 30–40 years of his life but never finished. Invisible Man is Ellison’s lone completed novel, yet 61 years after it was written, it shows no signs of being outdated. Along with a series of short stories and many rich, intelligent essays, Invisible Man helps Ellison raise key debates and questions about literature, American society, race relations, and the writer’s social responsibility to look into such deep issues.
Which is what Ellison, who chose to end his greatest American novel with this line, might have wanted: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, it will continue to speak for us?
The House of Mirth
Kirk Curnutt, Troy University
On the surface, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) indulges that great American pastime, hating the rich. The merciless way it exposes backstabbers, adulterers, conniving social climbers, and entitled sexual harassers as gauche frauds was certainly one reason the novel sold a blockbusting 140,000 copies in its first year alone. Yet Mirth is so much more than a fin-de-siècle Dallas or Dynasty. It’s our most economically minded Great American Novel, refusing to flim-flam us with dreams of lighting out for unregulated territories by insisting there’s no escaping the marketplace. Saturated with metaphors of finance, it depicts love and matrimony as transactions and beauty as currency. But if that sounds deterministic, Mirth is also beguilingly ambiguous, never shortchanging the complexity of human desire and motive.
Lily Bart, the twenty-nine year-old virgin whose value as marriage material plummets amid gossip, is an unusual representative American: the hero as objet d’art. Because she’s an individual and a romantic, it’s easy to cheer her refusals to sell out/cash-in by welshing on debts or blackmailing her way to financial security. Yet Lily is also ornamental — sometimes unconsciously, sometimes contentedly so — and that makes interpreting her impossible without implicating ourselves in the same idle speculation the book critiques, which is the point: Mirth challenges the valuation of women. To prevent her heroine from getting price-fixed in appraisal, Wharton shrouds Lily in a surplus of conflicting explanations, right up to her final glug of chloral hydrate, which readers still can’t agree is intentional or accidental.
The surplus is why whenever I read The House of Mirth I feel like I’m dealing with my own house — only I’m throwing words instead of money at the problem.
My only compensation?
I buy into books that leave me thinking I’d have an easier time mastering the stock market
Lolita
Albert Mobilio, The New School, and co-editor of Book Forum
Of course the great American novel would be written by an immigrant who didn’t arrive in this country until he was middle-aged and for whom English was merely one of his several languages. Of course he would be a European aristocrat who harbored more than a dash of cultural disdain for his adopted country where he only chose to reside for two decades (1940-1960) before repairing to the Continent.
But Nabokov was an American patriot, a sentiment he expressed when he recounted the “suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride” he felt showing his U.S. passport. So this hybrid figure, born in Russia, a resident of Prague, Berlin, and Montreux, took advantage of his relatively brief sojourn in America to write Lolita, a novel that not only speaks more intimately than any book by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Hemingway about our conflicted nature, but also enacts, via its high stylization, the great American seduction.
In Surprised by Sin, an analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Stanley Fish offered an explanation for why the speeches of Christ — as both poetry and rhetoric — paled when compared to those of Satan and his minions: Milton sought to ensnare his readers with Beelzebub’s wry wit, revealing them as devotees of showy display over the plain-speech of salvation.
Nabokov takes similar aim in Lolita: was there ever a more enchanting narrator than Humbert Humbert? From his opening, near sing-able lines (“light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul”) we are treated to intricately built description, deft rationalization, and elegant self-analysis all delivered in prose reflecting an intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the highest, most rarefied order. But he is also, in short, the devil. And Nabokov makes you love him. And we flatter ourselves for catching the clever allusions of, well, a rapist.
Humbert’s seduction of 12-year-old Dolores Haze (the European roué fouling the American (almost) virgin) certainly replays not only the grand theme of this nation’s discovery and founding, but welds that epic wrong to one far more familiar and, in terms of the felt experience of individuals, more emotionally serrated — the sexual abuse of a child by an adult. Nabokov depicts great sin as piecework, one-to-one destruction wrought by irresistibly attractive folks rather than something accomplished by armies or madmen. This sin, he goes on to suggest, is most effectively done with a shoeshine and a smile.
Nabokov didn’t need to live in the U.S. long to get our number. In fact, he started Lolita after just ten years in America. But this newcomer saw through to our core dilemma: from Barnum to Fox News, Americans love a good show. Beneath the gloss, though, lies a corruption, a despoiling impulse, that connects back to our original sin. Nabokov, an immigrant and ultimately a fellow despoiler, wrote a novel that re-enacts our fall and (here’s his most insidious trick) gets us to pride ourselves for being as smart as the devil himself.
The Making of Americans
Priscilla Wald, Duke University
When the novelist John William DeForest coined “the Great American Novel,” in a literary review in the January 1868 issue of The Nation, he intended to distinguish it from “the Great American Poem.” America was not ready for that higher art form. But “the Great American Novel” depicting “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence”? That was within the grasp of his contemporaries.
Time has worn away the distinction, and novels nominated for the title typically describe the grand odysseys of larger than life characters. But I want to take DeForest’s criteria seriously and nominate a novel that takes the ordinariness of America and Americans as its subject: Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
Stein’s novel chronicles the history and development of two Jewish immigrant families, but the plot is not its point. The Making of Americans is about the inner thoughts of its unexceptional characters; it is about the beautiful crassness of American materialism, and about the author’s love affair with language. In nearly 1000 pages of the prose that made Stein famous, she dramatizes her “interest in ordinary middle class existence, in simple firm ordinary middle class traditions, in sordid material unaspiring visions, in a repeating, common, decent enough kind of living, with no fine kind of fancy ways inside us, no excitements to surprise us, no new ways of being bad or good to win us.” The pleasure of this novel is in the play of its language. Readers must abandon themselves to the incantatory rhythms of Stein’s repetitions: “I will go on being one every day telling about being being in men and in women. Certainly I will go on being one telling about being in men and women. I am going on being such a one.”
The dashed hopes and dreams of Stein’s characters lack the magnitude of Ahab’s or Jay Gatsby’s falls; their unremarkable acceptance of diminished dreams lacks even the lyrical wistfulness of Ishmael or Nick Carraway. Instead, Stein’s characters come to life in her cadences, repetitions, and digressions: the poetry of the quotidian. That is what makes Americans and what makes The Making of Americans, and what makes The Making of Americans the great American novel.
Moby-Dick
Hester Blum, Penn State University
Moby-Dick is about the work we do to make meaning of things, to comprehend the world. We do this both as individuals and collectives. Here, Melville says through his narrator, Ishmael, I will cast about you fragments of knowledge drawn from books, travels, rumors, ages, lies, fancies, labors, myths. Select some, let others lie, craft composites. In Melville’s terms knowledge is a process of accretion, a taxonomic drive. What is American about this? The product of an amalgamated nation, Moby-Dick enacts the processes by which we are shaped — and, crucially, shapers — of parts that jostle together, join and repel.
There are things we know in Moby-Dick: We know, for one, that Captain Ahab lost his leg to the white whale, that he is maddened by being “dismasted.” We know Ahab is driven to pursue to the death what his first mate Starbuck believes is simply a “dumb brute,” rather than a reasoning, destructive force. Yet how we come to know things in and about Moby-Dick is not always evident, if ever. Here, for example, is how Melville describes the sound of grief made by Ahab when speaking of his missing limb and his need for revenge: “he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose.” There are flashier and more memorable lines than this one in the longer, pivotal chapter (“The Quarter Deck”). But we might linger on this unaccountable moose (as we could on many such arresting images in the novel): How do we come to know what a “heart-stricken moose” would sound like? Moby-Dick does not allow us to reject the outsized weirdness of this image, or to dispute how that poor, sad moose might have had its heart broken.
What makes Moby-Dick the Greatest American Novel, in other words, is that Melville can invoke the preposterous image of a sobbing, heart-stricken moose and we think, yes, I have come to know exactly what that sounds like, and I know what world of meaning is contained within that terrific sound. Moby-Dick asks us to take far-flung, incommensurate elements — a moose having a cardiac event, not to speak of a white whale bearing “inscrutable malice,” or the minutia of cetology — and bring them near to our understanding. What better hope for America than to bring outlandish curiosity — to try come to know — the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our world?
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Growing up in Scotland, I knew several farmers who pronounced with Delphic confidence on the weather. On a clear December day they would forecast a blizzard; in the middle of rain they would claim a drought was coming. 
I loved this book as much as anyone else, and it’s one of my favorites to be sure, but I don’t agree it is the #1 example of exceptional writing of the decade. And, after reviewing your entire list, I have to ask, why didn’t Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ even make a showing? I mean, did you read it?
I agree with d. Good novel and all, but an underwhelming choice for #1.
No.
Didn’t see that coming. I’m glad I read the book, but it wouldn’t have even made the top ten.
Are you fucking kidding me?!
Yes, it’s all an elaborate ruse.
I kinda saw this coming. While the list was being dribbled out I kept wondering when I’d see _The Corrections_ pop up. And here it is. Probably my favorite book of the decade.
I wouldn’t have thought to include short story collections on my very own personal best-of list, but maybe that’s why _Oblivion_ didn’t do as well. Or, to be completely honest, maybe _Oblivion_ wasn’t 100% awesome. Because it wasn’t. It was good, but not even _Brief Interviews_ good.
As for Mr. J. S-F… I thought his first book (_Everything Is Illuminated_) was much better than _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_. But that’s just me.
Finally, regarding _Tree of Smoke_ (which I’m currently reading); maybe it’s just too new? Too recent? I’m about 100p into it and so far it doesn’t crack my top 10 list, but maybe it gets way better or something.
So not! I’d be willing to see this on the list but number 1? No way. It’s a good book (I guess–personally, I prefer Franzen’s essays) but not at the top. On the other hand, it is silly, as Lydia mentions, to assign merit numerically. Compelling–and I was glad to be a part of it–but I need to remember that part too.
Keep in mind that this #1 slot goes to the book with the most votes. Everyone picked their 5 favorites, in no particular order. This just means that the most people had The Corrections on their list. Whether it was anyone’s favorite, #1 book, we can’t know.
You made the right choice. There has been a backlash against the book, really more against Franzen personally than the novel itself. It’s true that he handled the whole Oprah thing in a way that made him look like something of an ass, and some of the non-fiction stuff he’s written since has been, at best, ill-advised. But the novel itself is just simply remarkable and deserves its place at the top of your list. Considering said backlash, a brave choice.
Margot, since everybody else seems to want to use the comments to grind their ax against Jonathan Franzen, I will point out that you’ve written the best piece of the 20 on the list, in my opinion. Beautifully written and summing up much of the excitement that surrounded the book, a book by an author, who, at the time, wasn’t considered a master.
I was working at an independent bookstore when The Corrections was released, and I’d just started to think of fiction as something more than a diversion. This was the first book that I remember being excited about in advance. A storm is an apt metaphor, I suppose.
(As an aside, I remember seeing the galley in the back office in the owner/buyer’s pile. Attached was a note from the sales rep. It said, “I know you don’t think you can sell Franzen, but don’t overlook this one.” Things have changed, haven’t they?)
Ugh. Disappointing number one. Maybe try a different system in 2019?
Oh come on.
“People who were listening” to what, the marketing copy in the New York Times? This was the most pre-hyped novel I’ve ever seen, and the biggest disappointment.
First page, thrid paragraph: “Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety.”
That’s not writing, that’s posing. No one with taste above the level of a high-school poetry class could continue reading past these two sentences. The Corrections is crap.
Well, yes it was hyped, but think back to when it came out. It was published on September 1, 2001.
I read my review copy in the days immediately following 9/11. Despite the competition for my attention from real world events, I finished it. But because of its association in my mind with 9/11–an acute visceral association–I could never bring myself to re-read it.
Strange to say, when fall rolls around I tend to pick up and re-read Moby Dick, if only a few chapters.
In other news, the Academy Award for Best Picture doesn’t always go to the best picture! Usually I’m happy if the winner is in my top fifty. The Corrections is on my list of top fifty fiction books of the decade, somewhere in the middle, but more importantly, it’s funny. If you’re going to single out an American book, it might as well be one with good jokes.
I’m still more interested in the list of also-rans, since this seems likely to turn up a higher proportion of oddball picks.
This is an excellent novel and a worthy pick. Works like The Corrections make me stand up and cheer for the future of literature. It’s not perfectly written but it takes taste “above the level of high school poetry” to appreciate this novel’s important place in contemporary literature. Good choice.
The Corrections #1? Ahead of The Cloud Atlas and 2666? No way. Sorry. Corrections is well written and mildly diverting, but it’s really just a family soap opera. You have other books on your list far more daring and well written.
Enough with the lisiting and the besting. Unless you’ve read them all, you’re just burping in a whirlwind of presumptuous narcissism.
Cynthia writes, in part: “you’re just burping in a whirlwind of presumptuous narcissism.” Seems like a pretty good description of Franzen and the novel. And you don’t have to read every novel to recognize the deficiencies of any one of them. Logic fail.
This is a funny choice, because it’s so safe and predictable.
This is a deserving choice, but I’m a little surprised, because it somehow seemed to have become cool to dislike this book (probably because of Franzen’s public persona).
The biggest miss on the list in my view is Wallace’s Oblivion. This book is hugely underrated right now, but I think people will look back on it as a genuine step beyond Infinite Jest (whereas Brief Interviews was more of the, admittedly brilliant, same). Everything depends on The Pale King of course – it’s too early to understand the shape of Wallace’s career, but for the best writer of his generation not to appear on this list is a shame. Especially when Pastoralia, from a similarly-minded, very talented, but manifestly lesser writer than Wallace, is so high up on the list.
… The backlash is funny. Great book.
Interesting how the DFW fans continue to beat the drum. And he’ll always be free from backlash a la lil Kurt Cobain as it’s not good to criticize the departed.
Great list no matter what the muckrakers say. Anything that gets the conversation started is worthwhile. The publishing business is suffering.
I decided to read The Corrections because I had heard it was “serious” in some sense — seriously literary, I suppose. I thought it would be hard to read. Not hard, but tedious, for me. The commenter above who calls it a family soap opera was not far off the mark. Words that I’d use to describe The Corrections (and I carry no feelings of vitriol for Franzen — I can separate my opinions about the Oprah brouhaha from his work) include funny, peculiar, unpleasant, interesting, and at times memorable. But not great literature, and certainly not something I’d put on this list.
I was pleased to see the short story collection, which I loved.
The real problem with Franzen’s book is that its themes and topics are so trite. Oy! My family is so crazy! You should see! Compare with the themes of 2666 and The Cloud Atlas (and others), and there’s just no comparison. It’s like comparing an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Gravity’s Rainbow. And by the way, I’m not a DFW fan and hardly consider him beyond reproach.
I loved this book!
I thought “The Corrections” was a good book. Not the greatest ever–the voyage to Eastern Europe at the end was more adventure shlock than anything, to me–but if I were going to write up my own list I’m sure it would make my top 5, too, so I won’t much argue.
And then I’m just going to throw this out there: DFW, way overrated. Although I’m very sad he killed himself, I’m even more sad that his death is creating a cult of worship around him, as if his imaginitive powers were anywhere near those of a Roberto Bolano or David Mitchell.
I do have to ask, however: how did Margaret Atwood not make this list between The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake? Is there a greater novelist alive today than Margaret Atwood?
I’m a little late to this conversation, but I think a lot of the language used to deride Franzen’s book is very interesting. I read it and found it interesting, although not my favorite by a long shot. And I loved Cloud Atlas, for one. But to claim that Cloud Atlas is better because it deals with quote unquote major themes, while The Corrections is simply a “soap opera” is insulting. The idea that the family novel is lesser has been around for a long time, used to discredit much of the literature written by women, and, ironically, is what Franzen was trying to distance himself from when he turned down Oprah.
I think that the other line of inquiry going on here, about conventional novels vs. those that push the envelope of the genre, is very interesting. But to say that Franzen’s themes are somehow lowbrow or pedestrian is silly.
The CLoud Atlas and 2666 are not better books simply because they pursue grander themes than The Corrections, though that is one reason they are both better books. Remember, we’re talking about the best book of the millennium, not just books we happen to like or don’t like. In that contest, a certain amount of conceptual daring counts for a lot, if the execution is also well done. There’s nothing original about writing about a messed up family. Franzen isn’t trying anything different or difficult. He’s just doing a good job at telling a very conventional story. Stephen King does the same.
And it’s certainly not inherently lowbrow artistically to write about family life. One can write very deep, surprising novels about family life. I hope one day Franzen gets around to writing such a book.