About the Great American Novel

 

The Atlantic recently published a list of 136 books under the title The Great American Novels: 136 books that made America think.  It focused on books published in the last 100 years.  I thought it somewhat disappointing.  I thought it puzzling.  

I'm disappointed by the fact that I must admit that I've only read 7 of the 136 "Great American Novels."  It's true that as I've grown older, I've become less inclined to read novels, except as a means of escape from these dark times.  A novel need not be great to provide such escape.  I'm puzzled because it seems that these "Great American Novels" according to the magazine itself are not Great American Novels as I conceive them to be.  

Clearly, as I haven't read most of the novels on the list, I may be unqualified to opine on whether they're great, or American, or either or both.  But the problem I have arises from the way in which they're characterized by The Atlantic as "Great American Novels."  They're described as novels that made America think.  In what sense does that make them "Great American Novels"?

I think it's probable that there are and have been novels that "made America think" that aren't about America or Americans, and were not written by Americans.  Shouldn't they be "Great American Novels" as well, given such a definition?  Is War and Peace a Great American Novel?  Something by Proust? If not, why not?

Wouldn't the definition of a "Great American Novel" make more sense if it comported more directly with the qualifying word "American"?  Obviously, a novel may be great and have nothing to do with America or Americans or be written by an American. 

I assume that the authors of the books on the list are all Americans.  Is the fact that a great novel is written by an American sufficient to make it a "Great American Novel"?   Why wouldn't it be instead a great novel written by an American?   In what sense are A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dispossessed  Great American Novels, if not for the fact that they were written by Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, both Americans?  The stories told in each don't even take place on Earth.  Is it claimed that they deal with themes that are uniquely American?  How do we determine what those are in the first place?

Huckleberry Finn, referred to by Hemingway as the source of modern American fiction in the quote above, is easily identifiable as an American novel.  It was written by an American, the story told takes place in America and it deals with what is unquestionably a uniquely American subject matter.  The same can be said of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and other novels, each arguably "great."

If we are to speak of Great American Novels, it would seem to make far more sense to define them as those involving America, which take place in America, deal with themes identifiably if not exclusively American and are written by Americans.  To define them as those novels which made America think seems not to define them at all in any useful sense, unless Americans think differently than others do and about things others don't think of, which strikes me as a difficult claim to make.