The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

Mixing memoir with literary criticism and social critique, Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) contends that imaginative literature is essential to good citizenship. Having once advanced this thesis regarding her native Iran, she extends it now to her adopted United States. For Nafisi, America’s great works of literature make up a canon of supplementary founding documents, offering a purer articulation of the American dream than pols and pundits. In such books may be found the “Republic of Imagination,” in which heroic characters exemplify humanistic ideals. According to Nafisi, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn epitomizes America’s “national myth”—that of a vagrant underdog declaring his independence from a corrupt society and decamping with his moral courage to the wilderness. Similarly exemplary are “Huck Finn’s Progenies”: Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and John Singer in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Explaining how she came to appreciate the civic value of these books, Nafisi suggests that, as a refugee from a repressive regime, she can claim a privileged perspective on American ideals. Her social critique is scarcely original: most readers have heard that the downside of American freedom is American greed, that politicians are demagogues, and that American media is polarized. Through accessible and informative readings, however, Nafisi succeeds in conveying her broader point—that Great American Novels can teach us to be good “citizen readers.” [em]Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Oct.) [/em]