by Conroy
I’m slowly making my way through the American literary cannon, a book
at a time, in search of the elusive Great American Novel. I just completed
David Foster Wallace’s massive tome,
Infinite Jest, one of the more recent nominees for this title
[1]. At over 1,000 pages
(included over 90 pages of footnotes
[2]) Wallace’s dense and multi-layered story
certainly has the size of an epic. But his semi-parodic near future America and
focus on a Boston tennis academy, the residents of an adjacent halfway house,
wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, and an illicit movie so entertaining
that it’s lethal to all viewers is in my mind a bit too idiosyncratic
[3] to fit the bill as the Great
American Novel. But what does fit the bill?
In concept, the Great American Novel is a title given to the novel,
written by an American, which best encapsulates the American Experience, the
spirit of the nation and the people, or better described by borrowing a term
from German, the work that captures the
zeitgeist
of America. It’s the American equivalent of the national epic; America’s
Les Miserables,
Ulysses, or
War and Peace.
There’s no shortage of candidates for the title; here’s a shortlist (in
chronological order):
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
(1852),
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885),
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1925),
- The Sound and the Fury by
William Faulkner (1929),
- The Grapes of Wrath by John
Steinbeck (1939),
- The Catcher in the Rye by
J.D. Salinger (1951),
- The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Below (1953),
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov (1955),
- To Kill a Mockingbird by
Harper Lee (1960),
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas
Pynchon (1973),
- Blood Meridian by Cormac
McCarthy (1985), and
- Underworld by Don Delillo
(1997) [4].
Many of these books sit on my bookshelf, and many of them were rich
rewarding reads, and certainly each captures
a portion of the American Experience. For instance, in
Moby Dick [5] there is the struggle of
democracy, equality, and power, which echoes American pre-Civil War struggles
with slavery; in
Blood Meridian we are
shown in stark tones the violence that
accompanied the settling of the American West;
The Grapes of Wrath explores the crushing poverty of the Great
Depression; and
Underworld gives us lives
lived in the low heat of the Cold War during the last half of the twentieth century.
But like the still view of a photograph each of these novels and all the others listed
above can at best only capture a facet or a few facets of America, a limited angle, nuances
and not the whole. After all America is too large, with a huge diverse
population drawn from all over the world, and a history and culture too
sprawling to ever be captured by one writer in one novel no matter how
kaleidoscopic the story or how broad the cast of characters. And the same could
be written about the efforts of a single filmmaker or historian or journalist. But
this isn’t meant to diminish the writers (and other chroniclers) that attempt
great novels or reach to express what America means. In fact I much admire the
ambition of writers that yearn to express the soul of America even if the best
they can achieve is partial success.
Whenever I think on novels and literature I always fall back to James Joyce
and
Ulysses because I’ve never read
anything better. Joyce
set out to write an Irish national epic and perhaps he
succeeded (it’s worth keeping in mind that Ireland is a much smaller country
than the United States), but what really speaks to me when reading
Ulysses isn’t the Irish elements.
Instead, when I strip away the structural and stylistic flourishes and place
the literary, philosophic, and religious (and many other) correspondences in
perspective, I find the most alive book I’ve ever read. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom,
Stephan Daedalus, Molly Bloom, and what seems to be the whole population of
Dublin come alive through their thoughts, emotions, motivations, memories,
physical urges, biases, their interactions with each other, and their shared
histories.
Ulysses takes place over
less than 24 hours, but it gives us the fullest glimpse of life and lives of
any fiction I’ve read or watched or listened to
[6]. Scholars and academics may be kept busy dissecting Joyce's techniques and allusions, but for me it’s the life of the novel
that makes it important and worthwhile.
And indeed, while I can say pretty emphatically that Wallace’s
Infinite Jest is not the Great American
Novel, it is a book teeming with truths. Wallace’s collection of tennis prodigies,
recovering (and not recovering) alcoholics and drug addicts, terrorists and
government agents, and everyone they interact with, is vivid and bursting with life.
At the core, after you’ve taken his weird future in stride, Wallace’s
characters struggle with what it means to be a family, to make and sustain human
connections, and to cope with the burden of being alive. It’s his take on the
plight of what he considers to be the sad post-Cold War generations and our
collective need to find some distraction, be it drugs or entertainment or
sexual conquests, from the day-to-day struggle. And his remarkably fluid
writing style (the words seem to have flowed onto the page from his mind), massive
vocabulary (Wallace makes you keep your dictionary close), and talent for perfectly
expressing detail (that tool that all great novelists must have) make
Infinite Jest a first-rate and worthy read
[7].
I’ve always believed that great artists, and especially novelists, are
better equipped to describe the workings of the mind, from our motivations and
emotions and rationalizations to our physical cravings and how we perceive the
world, than science or religion or philosophy. Novelists like Joyce and Wallace
offer insights into what is means to be human. As the great critic Harold Bloom
noted, reading a novel isn’t going to make you a better person, but hopefully
reading a great novel will provide at least a tiny explanation of life. If an
author can do that, he or she has achieved a great success.
So I’ll continue searching for the Great American Novel. I doubt I’ll ever
find one book that expresses all that “America” means or is, but I am certain
that what I will find is even more important, glimpses of truth and life. That’s
all we can seek from any art.
---
NOTES:
[1]
Infinite Jest was published in 1996,
when Wallace was just 33-years-old.
[2]
Anyone familiar with Wallace’s writing, fiction and non-fiction alike, knows of
his very effective use of footnotes, which I must admit is a bit of an
inspiration for my own notes.
[3]
This is but the barest synopsis of Infinite Jest, which is rich in characters,
sub-plots, themes, and exquisite detail.
[4]
And this list could be expanded to include Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Robert Penn Warren’s
All the Kings Men (1946), Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy (1925), Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22 (1953), Wallace’s
Infinite
Jest (1996), Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible
Man (1952), Richard Wright’s
Native
Son (1940), Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s
Complaint (1969), John Updike’s
Rabbit
series, Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse
Five (1969), Ernest Hemingway’s
The
Sun Also Rises (1926), John Dos Passos’s
USA Trilogy (1938), and Henry James’s
The Wings of the Dove (1902), to name but a few.
[5]
A work I must admit that I don’t particularly care for.
[6]
I’ll be returning to discuss
Ulysses much more fully in future posts.
[7]
After reading the novel and Wallace’s descriptions of the crushing weight, the
unendurable weight, of clinical depression, it is less of a surprise that he
killed himself in 2008. He suffered from depression all his life and eventually
the medications stopped working for him. It’s deeply sad and will deprive us of
any more work from this gifted American writer. He left behind not only
Infinite Jest but a large collection of
entertaining, informative, and incisive essays and non-fiction pieces along
with a couple of short story collections and a couple of other novels (the last
of which,
The Pale King, was unfinished
upon his death and published posthumously).
