Last Great American Whale

Or, 55 more American Novels that needed to be on that list

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Last week, The Atlantic released their list of “The Great American Novels,” which, like any list making enterprise, was successful in making a lot of people upset. According to the preamble before the list, “[t]he American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it?” To the assorted editors and writers tasked with making the selection, that turned out to be, for whatever reason, precisely 136 books taken from the last 100 years. Who knows how they arrived at those numbers; the choice for cutting it off at books published after 1923 is cited as “narrow[ing] the aperture,” while the number of titles was apparently unlimited, as they weren’t going to be hemmed in by a “round, arbitrary number.” The apparent lack of an upper limit makes some of the omissions all the more glaring; if the list is capacious enough to include three (worthy) titles by Toni Morrison, why not throw The Bluest Eye in there too? Why is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow not included along with his The Crying of Lot 49?¹ (Infinite Jest is on this list, and would not exist without Gravity’s Rainbow.) And just where the hell are Revolutionary Road, The Recognitions, True Grit or White Noise? If an underlying goal was to “make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten,” where are Omensetter’s Luck, A Fan’s Notes, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, Sometimes a Great Notion, Warlock, or Pity the Beast? The nice thing about a “round, arbitrary number” is that it lets you say, ‘well, not every good book could make the cut’ when something is excluded, but this list could include anything; every list has to end – we could not have a Borgesian full-size map of American literature – but still, the Atlantic still left some real meat on the American bone. And they wouldn’t even have to kick anyone off of it to add to it! Is there anything more American than taking up a bunch of space and going on and on and on about your own exceptionalism? 156 books? 178 books? 199.99 books? Why not??

My personal taste aside – we all have different standards of Greatness and American-ness, and of the 136 The Atlantic picked, there are only a few true duds² and many, many books that finally get some well-deserved canonization shine³ – the decision to limit the books to the last 100 years seems at once a cynical move to include more recent and relatively popular titles at the expense of dusty old classics as well as an indicator of a severely myopic, dehistoricized view of American literature. You may be tired of hearing about how great Moby-Dick is, but if there even is such a thing as a ‘Great American Novel,’ Moby-Dick is it. Leaving Melville aside – and they still could’ve snuck him in there with Billy Budd (written in 1886, published in 1924) if they’re going to call Claude McKay’s Amiable With Big Teeth, written in the 1930s, a 2017 release – there is no American literature without Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edith Wharton, or Louisa May Alcott, to mention a few. (Little Women is an especially strange omission for a list that puffs its chest out about including three children’s books, while also maintaining that no worthy ones have been published since Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in 1970). My friend Matt would also kill me if I didn’t bring up Frank Norris’s The Octopus as a crucial pre-1924 American text (emphasis on the American, he walked so Steinbeck could run). Lincoln Michel, among others, has also pointed out the oddity of removing short story collections from the running; they’re not novels, I know, but what is American fiction (of the last 100 years and beyond) without Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, or Denis Johnson? The CIA didn’t bankroll American MFA programs for nothing – we’re damn good at short stories! Hemingway and Joy Williams and a couple others on the list are better short story writers than novelists anyway. (No offense to Hemingway or Williams’ novels on the list, which are both excellent, but they unlock something different in their stories.)

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the list is just how close it is to being a great one, and how it limits itself by timeframe and its positively un-American decision to be stingy in its inclusions. Add these titles to the list and all will be well in the world; I won’t even be mad that you snuck Stephen King on there. Links to things I’ve written on any of these titles or authors are there just in case you’re curious; take those in lieu of a pithy blurb for each.

• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe (1838) (or a collection of his stories)

• The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850-51)

• Moby-Dick, or the Whale; The Piazza Tales (stories), Herman Melville (1851, 1857)

• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884)

• Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers, The Bostonians, The Golden Bowl, Henry James (1881-1904, pick any number and combination of titles you want)

• The Octopus, Frank Norris (1901, for Matt)

• The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1905, 1913, 1920)

• My Antonia, Willa Cather (1921)

• In Our Time, Men Without Women, story collections, Ernest Hemingway (1925, 1927)

• A Good Man is Hard to Find, stories, Flannery O’Connor (1955)

• The Recognitions, J R, William Gaddis (1955, 1975)

• Warlock, Oakley Hall (1958)

• Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (1961)

• V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon (1963, 1973, 1997)

• Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey (1964)

• Stoner, Augustus, John Williams (1965, 1972)

• Omensetter’s Luck, William Gass (1966)

• A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley (1968)

• True Grit, Charles Portis (1968)

• The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (1970)

• Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner (1971)

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1976-81)

• The Changeling, Breaking & Entering, Escapes (stories), Joy Williams (1978, 1988, 1990, though any of her story collections would work)

• Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick (1979)

• So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell (1979)

• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy (1979, for Matt, Phil, and Joe)

• We’ll just throw in Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories (1981) here

• The Names, White Noise, Don DeLillo (1982, 1985)

• Angels, Jesus’ Son (stories), Train Dreams, Denis Johnson (1983, 1992, 2011)

• A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, Kathryn Kramer (1984)

• Let’s throw Lucia Berlin’s Homesick: New and Selected Stories here (1990)

• Gilead, Home, Lila, Marilynne Robinson (2004-14)

• Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann (2019)

• Pity the Beast, Robin McLean (2021)

That’s 55 more books, which brings our grand total to to 191 books over 186 years, which is just as non-arbitrary and non-round a number as 136 books over 100 years, and we’ve already got a fuller and richer portrait of great American fiction in our country’s brief span. Some are there for their greatness as literature, some for their sheer Americanness in ambition and novelistic naïveté, a couple even manage both greatness and great Americanness. We didn’t even have to stretch to throw James Fennimore Cooper or some other early American writer in there, the postmodernists of the midcentury – one of America’s gifts to world literature – are now fairly represented, we put in DeLillo’s best books rather than just his longest one and Pynchon’s best books rather than just his shortest one, we didn’t add anything from the past two years, because, god, can’t you let them breathe for a little bit before it’s a Great American Novel, and I still left off some cherished novels whose exclusion will make me lose sleep at night⁴, which proves there is an actual end to this canon, an actual aesthetic line drawn somewhere. (The line is at Lonesome Dove, precisely.) I expect to be given a cushy editor emeritus gig at The Atlantic shortly; till then, you can let me know what I missed, because that’s half the fun of any list: letting the ingrate who made it know exactly where and how they messed up.

1. At least give me Mason & Dixon!

2. Paid subscribers, I am happy to tell you exactly which titles should be deleted from the list with extreme prejudice; everyone else will just have to live with me playing nice.

3. In particular: Ann Petry’s The Street, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (his best), Joy Williams’ Quick and the Dead, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Charles Portis’ Dog of the South, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.

4. Mrs. Bridge… The Moviegoer… Vineland… Norwood… Lonesome Dove… The Tunnel… Miss MacIntosh, My Darling… The Wild Palms… Wittgenstein’s Mistress… Confederacy of Dunces…please forgive me…