The Dream of the Great American Novel

Impressive in scope, erudition, and detail, this survey of U.S. literary and cultural history by Harvard professor Buell (Emerson) envisions the “distinctive and durable preoccupation” of identifying the Great American Novel (G.A.N.) as an endless quest to capture “the American soul” in “geographical scope” and “sociological comprehensiveness,” and as a relevant set of criteria for evaluating works of significance or mass appeal. Nominally the history of an idea, Buell offers a series of seasoned and insightful analyses on the “defining works” grouped by four different “scripts”: the “detailed ethnography of early colonial culture and institutions” (Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter); the “rags to riches” arc (Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and others); the history of slavery (Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Morrison’s Beloved); and epic “megafictions” (Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow). Buell argues that the greatest novels cast a critical eye on “the gap between democratic promise and actuality” disguised by national myths. In addition, he decodes how these books shape political and social philosophies, accruing “cultural capital” if not icon status, as with Melville’s Moby-Dick. Buell sees well beyond the canonical Great White Males and perceives American studies as a properly “transnational” and “transpacific” profession. Buell’s engaging book should itself become a landmark of American studies, as it exemplifies precisely why great literature needs to be read and taught. (Feb.)