I audio-read Augie March a few months ago, and loved Bellow's erudition and comic timing (if such can be said of a novelist). Definitely a candidate for the Great American Novel, with the obvious, all too common caveat: 'by a white Jewish male', and it's partner 'by a white non-Jewish male.' Catch-22 belongs up there in the GAN conversation too (caveat #1).
What about a post on the GAN? (Maybe you've done this and I am revealing that I haven't read every single thing on this site (yet)). The construct of the GAN requires us to spend time chatting about great and American, of course, and how they can be contained in a novel, and what the various constraints and definitions might suggest about us as readers/critics.
Plus, then, we can speculate on caveat #3: 'by an other-than-white-male', and propose candidates. Shipping News? Poisonwood Bible? (Do GANs have to take place in America? Another thing to puzzle out.) Beloved? The Sellout? Sing, Unburied, Sing? How old do they have to be? How long before we can say they stood the test of time?
I remember Joseph Campbell saying that the modern world started when [some group of people--was it knights??] rode together into a clearing . . . and each left by a different route. Anyway, a thought: We may have reached a point where there's such an outpouring of voices previously left out of the conversation that the whole idea of a GAN has been left behind--there's so much diversity that the idea of one GAN seems impossible . . . and maybe this fact will shine light backwards onto what that term meant in the past, what a symptom of a too-narrow conversation it was. I don't have time to track it down tonight, but I remember reading in The Atlantic (possibly Harpers) the piece about Augie March being the GAN--and it was back in Kalispell, so sometime before 1999 . . .
I audio-read Augie March a few months ago, and loved Bellow's erudition and comic timing (if such can be said of a novelist). Definitely a candidate for the Great American Novel, with the obvious, all too common caveat: 'by a white Jewish male', and it's partner 'by a white non-Jewish male.' Catch-22 belongs up there in the GAN conversation too (caveat #1).
What about a post on the GAN? (Maybe you've done this and I am revealing that I haven't read every single thing on this site (yet)). The construct of the GAN requires us to spend time chatting about great and American, of course, and how they can be contained in a novel, and what the various constraints and definitions might suggest about us as readers/critics.
Plus, then, we can speculate on caveat #3: 'by an other-than-white-male', and propose candidates. Shipping News? Poisonwood Bible? (Do GANs have to take place in America? Another thing to puzzle out.) Beloved? The Sellout? Sing, Unburied, Sing? How old do they have to be? How long before we can say they stood the test of time?
I remember Joseph Campbell saying that the modern world started when [some group of people--was it knights??] rode together into a clearing . . . and each left by a different route. Anyway, a thought: We may have reached a point where there's such an outpouring of voices previously left out of the conversation that the whole idea of a GAN has been left behind--there's so much diversity that the idea of one GAN seems impossible . . . and maybe this fact will shine light backwards onto what that term meant in the past, what a symptom of a too-narrow conversation it was. I don't have time to track it down tonight, but I remember reading in The Atlantic (possibly Harpers) the piece about Augie March being the GAN--and it was back in Kalispell, so sometime before 1999 . . .