The First Great American Novel

Matt Yglesias has been pimping Moby Dick as a great American novel that explains much about our national character. He takes issue in the linked post with Kevin Drum's dismissal of Melville's whale of a tale, but I have to admit that I think Yglesias is wrong. I am firmly in Hemingway's camp on this one; the first great American novel is Huckleberry Finn, as long as you take in to account that a long piece of fiction writing is not necessarily a novel. Long fiction is probably as old as the art of story-telling. The "novel" is a particular type of fiction, one that seeks to illustrate not just the events it chronicles, but the entire zeitgeist through character, setting, dialogue, plot, and so forth. By this set of criteria, Moby Dick for all its many virtues is not a novel; Huckleberry Finn is.

For that matter, in the manner of 20th century American novels, I would think that An American Tragedy or Sister Carrie, for all that Dreiser wasn't a master story-teller, are far more in the way of "novels" than The Great Gatsby. Similarly, Faulkner's tales of southern families in decline are much less novels than his contemporary, Steinbeck. In particular East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath are better representatives of the novel than The Sound and the Fury (the first section of which is nearly unreadable) or As I Lay Dying.

Furthermore, I would offer this radical notion (and I know that Feodor is going to huff and puff about what follows): among our post-war fiction authors, few can match three novels by Stephen King for capturing not just the spirit of the age, but tossing our fears about these times back in our faces, forcing us to confront our own inner demons. 'Salem's Lot, The Stand, and It each in their own way are far more than, in turn, a pulp-style "vampires comes to small-town America", "Armageddon times 2", and "Killing a monster at a class reunion". The first is as much a sociological treatise on the American small town in an age of decline, which offers a glimpse of why a creature such as Barlow would have so much ease at taking it over. The Stand, while bearing a similarity to the fiction of destruction so prevalent of the late-1970's, was borne out of an attempt by King to write a novel about the 1960's. His struggles ended when he decided to write a novel about the 1970's instead, but in the process managed to present the degradation the United States had suffered in that decade. In It, we have the fictionalized account of how the children who lived in the shadow of our Cold War insecurities managed to conquer those fears, even at great cost. It is a very different novel than The Stand precisely because it is far more optimistic about our national character. Written and published during the years of High Reaganism, it offers the opportunity, I think for King to picture his generation doing what he believed they could have done, and perhaps should have done, rather than, as he wrote much later, trading in changing the world for the Home Shopping Network.

In any event, literary criticism is a bit like music criticism, much more a reflection on the prejudices and limitations of the critic than any inherent merits or demerits of the subject under criticism.

Moby Dick is a great read (even though the various chapters on whales and whaling should have been included in an appendix or something), and it does have quite a bit to say about our national character, or at least Yankee character, it isn't a "novel" in the way Huckleberry Finn is a novel.