'That Marsh Light Is Still Burning Hard'

I’m suspicious of the itch for ranking books and making lists. Too often it’s a substitute for actually reading them, a ruse for flaunting one’s hipness or sophistication. My late friend David Myers was fond of assembling such lists, which are likely to assure higher-than-average readership. You don’t have to waste all that time wading through analysis. David has done it for you. He had a taste for provocation and wasn’t shy about indulging it.

 

Fifteen years ago he titled a post “Greatest Novel Ever” on The Commonplace Blog. That’s like a sideshow barker luring the rubes, but in David’s hands it was also a bit of fun. He said his list  represents “the greatest English-language novels published since the era of Dickens and Eliot” – a ridiculous claim but nearly irresistible with a reader and critic of David's caliber. It invites endorsement and contempt – that is, an argument, something David loved and I detest.

 

I bring this up because a rather earnest young reader has asked me about that once vital, now moribund species, the Great American Novel. That was a big deal when I was a young reader. Now I feel a little sheepish just bringing it up. I’ll make one concession and cite the likely candidate among the authors of that mythical beast. No surprises here: Herman Melville, Henry James, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, William Maxwell, Ralph Ellison. The criterion is pretty simple: they wrote the American novels I reread most often. I think of Kingsley Amis’ remarks in his Paris Review interview in 1975:

 

“The lure of the Great American Novel—it’s no longer, perhaps, the Great American Novel, because that sounds like the dull, or traditional, American novel—but the Important, the Significant, the New, the most American American Novel . . . I think that marsh light is still burning hard.”