Debating the Best American FictionIn praise of "small" novels.
Posted Sunday, May 21, 2006, at 3:17 PM ET
On Sunday, the New York Times published a list of the best works of American fiction of the last 25 years, chosen by 125 or so judges (whose company I was invited to join, but in the end didn't). The usual suspects were all on it: Toni Morrison's Beloved. Don DeLillo's Underworld, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (tied with Updike), and Philip Roth's American Pastoral. They were usual not only because their authors are the biggest names in American literature, but also because the books named were sprawling ones. While these are all excellent, even great, novels, their presence at the top of the list may tell us something about our unconscious cultural biases against the so-called small novel. Generalizations are odious, but if you peruse the extended shortlist—17 more books—you'll find that even the fiction there is in some sense "large." The only exceptions are Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (a story collection), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
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StumbleUponThe bias against the short novel has deep roots. The American novel (and American canon-making) has always been a highly self-conscious enterprise. The aim of our early writers was not merely to write a great work of art, but to make a great American work of art. Yet early on American writers were anxious about what James Fenimore Cooper worried in 1828 was a "poverty of materials." It wasn't until Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman seized on what Philip Rahv called "the tensions and hazards" of the American experience that our literature began to look robust, imaginative, and new to its own creators and early critics. They made up for the perceived "paucity of ingredients" with an impressively self-conscious gusto; their methods were as big as their vision. Consider Whitman's sprawling poetic line, his insistent use of anaphora; James' knotted, lengthy sentences, and his protracted epics of social mores, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors; or Melville's Moby-Dick.
In the decades that followed, our notion of the great American novel became entwined with a perception that shorter books weren't, somehow, as serious. Seriousness required self-consciousness, and self-consciousness required expansiveness. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, he and Maxwell Perkins worried that it was too short; indeed, the book—a mere 50,000 words or so—did less well commercially than his earlier novels. Complaining that it never became a best seller, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend about his misjudgment: "It was too short. Remember this. Never write a book under sixty thousand words." Luckily for Fitzgerald, his closing pages draw back to meditate, self-consciously, on the nature of the tension between the private and the public in America, offering a prime example of what Philip Rahv once said was the ur-aim of American literature: to contemplate "the discrepancy between the high promise of the American dream and what history has made of it."
The notion that "small" novels are unworthy of high critical esteem has been especially pervasive of late. Somewhere along the way, the critique of the small novel got bound up with a critique of the well-crafted novel that proliferated with the rise of MFA programs. Even as Gatsby, Lolita, and Rabbit Run (all short novels) entered our canon, the "small" novel became inextricably linked in critic's minds with domestic and generally female novels of the sort that Gail Caldwell, the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, indicted in a 2003 interview, when she lamented the dire state of American fiction. "There are a great number of contemporary fiction writers who go for the myopic sensitive-heart rending personal blah, blah, blah, blah, blah small novel," she complained, announcing her love of "big brilliant novels" and praising the panoramic skills of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. In 2004, after the National Book Award nominees were announced—in an act of apparent rebelliousness, the judges had chosen five short, lyrical books by women, leaving off Philip Roth's Plot Against America—Caryn James wrote in the New York Times that the real problem with the finalists was not that they were unknown, but that they did not write "big, sprawling novels."
What's been lost in the conflation of "small" and "small-minded" is the recognition that small books can be powerful vehicles for big ideas—to say nothing of powerful examples of aesthetic rigor. In his otherwise astute essay accompanying the Times' list, A.O. Scott succumbed to a form of category confusion when he explained the absence of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in the top five by noting that they are "small" books that do not "generalize" but "document"—a peculiar misreading of both novels, which hardly shy away from probing large themes, and do so with metaphoric richness. In fact, plenty of big novels do far more documenting than these two masterpieces.
This odd assertion—emblematic of the broader cultural confusion—raises a question that no one seems to have a satisfying answer to: What exactly makes a novel small, aside from its length? And if we don't know, is the term more of an obstacle than an aid in taking stock of great literature? The Great Gatsby, after all, might seem to be a small book: It is a novel of "lyric incisiveness," as Claudia Roth-Pierpont has put it, and deals with a small group of characters over a relatively short period of time. The narrative is a single thread, filtered through Nick Carraway's narration, rather than the intricate crosscutting—a la Underworld or The Corrections—that characterizes "big" novels. Clearly, part of what makes Gatsby seem big in our eyes today is that it frames its tale as a purposeful meditation on the American dream, and its propulsive last page explicitly deals with the tension between nostalgia for and disenchantment with our past's promise of an innocent future.
Being termed "small," it seems, is a verdict on whether a book is familiarly "American." It reflects a perceived failure to pursue explicitly enough, in formal or thematic terms, our representative narratives of money, regret, ambition, and individual struggle in the messy maelstrom of contemporary social reality. Would Rabbit Run (272 pages), we may wonder, have been called a small novel if it had shown up on its own (rather than in an edition of the Rabbit series) among the top five selected? Perhaps not, because it tells a story we've already accepted as somehow American: the spiritual quest of a man trying to break free from the normalizing bonds of marriage and the expectations of material success. But if Rabbit Run opened with a bored housewife in a remote town, rather than with a former star athlete playing basketball, would it suddenly seem small?
I'm not sure. But Housekeeping is itself anything but a small book. It is the story of a young woman's gradual alienation from the microcosm of American life that is her town, and her ultimate decision to abandon her sister and her aunts and take another path, that of the American drifter, living forever on the margins of society, refusing to shape herself to society's conventional requirements. The book is suffused with Shakespearean and biblical language, entirely self-aware of the Western canon it draws on in shaping a narrative and a set of metaphoric insights as profound as those found in more sprawling tomes. Its achievement, finally, may be tightly contained (the book is only 226 pages long ), but it is as deep as the fearsome lake that floods the narrator's town periodically, and into which her own mother threw herself many years ago. The preoccupations, the materials, are as American as they come: the quest of the outsider for solitude, for a vantage that can only be gotten outside the web of social interactions that make for big fictional canvasses. (I was surprised, too, that Robinson's Gilead, a deceptively quiet historical meditation on American slavery and religious conflict—big topics—didn't even make it onto the shortlist.)
Big novels may indeed contain more of the flotsam and jetsam of social reality than shorter novels do. But concision, lyrical intensity (not the same thing as "well-crafted prose"), and metaphorical depth are in principle as aesthetically valuable as expository generalization, sweep, and narrative complexity. Taut perfection may not be the only hallmark of a good novel (the novel has always been an expansive form), but it is surely one of them. It's time that the books we call "small" get a closer look, which would reveal some of them to be as intellectually and artistically ambitious as their fatter counterparts. Among the ones I'd begin by nominating for our parallel tradition are, in addition to Housekeeping, Denis Johnson's Angels (Philip Roth called it "a small masterpiece"), James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Edmund White's Forgetting Elena, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, and (going further back), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. When it comes to celebrating the American novel, thinking big is only a form of being small-minded.
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Finally, someone has written about the importance of short novels. I have long been disgusted by the egocentric, huge novels of our so-called best writers. Give me a nice, short Graham Greene novel like The Quiet American (though he is a British Writer) that foretold the Vietnam War, or any of the three Depford Trilogy novels from Robertson Davies (though Canadian). I would even take one of James Lee Burke's mysteries, rather then sit down and try - just try to get through Pynchon or Wolf or some other self-satisfied yahoo. One of my favorite novels of all time is the Pulitzer winning "Tales of the South Pacific" - the first novel of "let me write long" Mitchner and the inspiration for a silly musical called South Pacific. I still consider it one of the most important war novels. I remember about ten years ago, sitting down and reading Bridges of Madison County in just a few hours and deriving guilty pleasure from being able to complete a novel in one afternoon. If short stories are considered an important art form, why aren't short novels?
--yerevan
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Pynchon's not E-Z enough for the boys. Forsome reason, Amercian critics all wet their pants every time Don DeLillo puts out a novel (except for his football book, which was, incidentally, his most finished novel; the only one that doesn't just sorta peter out in the end), but can't be bothered to read _Vineland_?
Why is there this small, almost entirely male and white canon of '"important" authors?
My own view is that the entire project (the NYTimes project that set this argument in motion) was skewed by its stipulation that everybody would get to vote for the ONE great novel, the one big book. With that kind of burden of importance haunting the enterprise, who's going to vote for Oxherding Tale_ or _The Circus of Doctor Lao_ or _Tripmaster Monkey_ or anything by Johathan Carroll or Raphael Aloysius Lafferty?
The failure of the entire project is that it stinks of IMPORTANCE. It's a blowahrd's blue plate special. Tedious, dreary writers like Cormack McCarthy thrive on importance. Ishmael Reed seems to long for importance, but his novels don't stink of the need -- it seems they'd rather amuse, inform and tell a story.
--melvil
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A great American novel must have at least two concerns: American reality and American beauty. America is a violent, hard, ignorant place. Always has been. Plus it has always had the (some say, an unctuous) patina of religiosity. Part of the reality is also the wealth and the opportunity. The American dream must be played large because it contradicts itself, recurrs and reverberates differently for different populations and generations. Small, metaphorically or actually, can be satisfying, but usually not.
The first great American novelist was the internationally renowned Washington Irving. The first successful American writer was Jonathon Edwards. Very big.
--leekee
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Where is the formal experimentation? I got so depressed reading the list of books receiving votes, and Tony Scott's essay. There's great diversity thematically, in terms of genre and ideology, but there's a common dearth of writing that attempts to stretch the bounds of prose. This is a list that Jonathan Franzen can love, but leaves little to celebrate for anyone who loves William Gaddis or Gertrude Stein or John Barthes.
I'm not in love with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I was happy to see in Dave Eggers a writer who doesn't shrink from the challenge of expanding what can be done in a popular novel. I know that many people's eyes glaze over when Ulysess is mentioned in a discussion about the state of the novel. But I still see it dominating in absence. I read the NYT's list and all I see is retreat.
Ernest Hemingway and his legacy paralyzed American literature for decades. Can't we move beyond "The boat was small. The water was cold. The fish was strong."? I know it would be a foolish generalization to say that this list doesn't include much deeper and more complex work than that. But I do think that, in this list, Cormac McCarthy and Saul Bellow (who's work did as much as Pynchon's to rehabilitate the American novel) are the exception, and Philip Roth the rule.
What do you think?
--TheSunGod
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