An elegy for the great American novel
If any writer believed in the existence of the Great American Novel it was Norman Mailer. He believed in it utterly, called it the "big one" and dreamed of bagging it – like a hunter in search of game. Now, he and many of his fellow hunters are gone. Can anyone take their place?
By John Walsh
Published: 14 November 2007
To think of Norman Mailer dying is to contemplate a fortress crumbling; a mile-high section of ice-cliff crashing into the Antarctic sea; a shambling hairy behemoth from the jungle of prehistory brought to its knees by a silver bullet. Everything about him was larger, and mostly scarier, than life: his umpteen wives, the size of his books, his capacity for drink and drugs, his fondness for violence as a kind of "cleansing" statement, his courting of attention and controversy, his keenness to protest against war (or feminism) at the drop of a syllable, his determination to try anything he fancied, no matter how unsuited he was – running for mayor of New York, directing films – as if he might succeed by brute force.
A short man, he compensated for lack of inches by his spectacular barrel chest and his quickness to anger. And he possessed a slightly deranged respect for bodily essences: for blood, for the heart, for sperm (he was appalled by the idea of masturbation) and for the principle of conception. He could be shockingly brutal about it – he once said he abhorred contraception because it denied him the frisson of excitement that the woman he was pleasuring might die in childbirth – but his reverence for acts of creation never left him in eight and a half decades.
The obituaries devoted far more column inches to his pugilism and manic energy, his shocking pronouncements and womanising, than to his actual writings, but they were agreed on one thing: not since Hemingway had there been a writer so convinced that writing is in itself a heroic enterprise, the work of a man of action, the outpouring of a giant ego that somehow embodies the nation that spawned him. The ideal of the two-fisted, typewriter-pounding tough guy owes less to Hemingway, in fact, then to André Malraux, the impossibly brave French war hero and novelist who became minister of culture; one can see how Mailer's political ambitions might have been stirred by Malraux's example. But it was an ideal that brought with it a holy grail: that of a single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics. It would be the War and Peace of the great plains and the Manhattan skyline. It would be the Great American Novel.
Mailer believed in it utterly. He called it "the big one" and dreamed of bagging it one day, as game hunters go after "the big five" of elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino and leopard. From the start he nursed Tolstoyan ambitions – or, given his interest in writing about psychological states under extreme pressure, Dostoevskyan ambitions. He wrote The Naked and the Dead at 24, a partly autobiographical account of a reconnaissance platoon of riflemen in the South Pacific, and the deadly tensions between them, and said of his experience while writing it, "Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since War and Peace. On the other hand, I also thought, 'I don't know anything about writing. I'm virtually an imposter.'"
Imposter or not, he was lionised by literary society, the book became a bestseller – and he never published anything as popular again. Mailer tried to repeat his early success in books that explored themes of power and corruption – Barbary Shore, The Deer Park – but they refused to command the same attention, and he turned more to journalism, to reportage and essays, and writing about large iconic figures of American life: Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali. Rather plaintively, in Cannibals and Christians, he upbraided other writers for their failure to produce works that "would clarify a nation's vision of itself". He was, in effect, temporarily shelving his attempt on the Great American Novel (though he took it up again later, with Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost) and challenging his post-war peers to match him.
That was 40 years ago. Since then, assaults on the GAN have come thick and fast from Mailer's contemporaries and the generation one step behind them. Kurt Vonnegut, Heller, Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal were, like Mailer, men who had experienced the war at first-hand; that experience gave their writing an unarguable head-start over their peers, even when their themes transcended simple messages: Catch-22 was a satire on bureaucracy and naked capitalism as much as on the folly of war; Bellow hit his stride with the Don Quixote-esque Adventures of Augie Marsh; Vonnegut, after the slender masterpiece Slaughterhouse 5, skidded off into science fiction and whimsy.
The post-war rebuilding of American society, and the rise of suburban culture saw the apotheosis of John Updike, whose Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest) minutely inspected the life of an American homme moyen sensuel – ex-jock turned car salesman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom – teasing out what he wanted, what he settled for and what he got. Philip Roth published something actually titled The Great American Novel in 1973, a long remembrance by an octogenarian sportswriter about a homeless baseball team, but critics mostly refused to take the hint implied by the title and hail it as a masterpiece. JD Salinger, after one novel and three slim dispatches about life in the Glass family, fell silent. Thomas Pynchon, having embraced a similarly reclusive lifestyle after The Crying of Lot 49, delivered the ragged, awesomely learned extravaganza, Gravity's Rainbow, but only over-stimulated students wanted to embrace it as the grail of US literature.
In 1966, Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, a stunning journalistic report about the killing of the Clutter family by two drifters in rustic Kansas. It was a true story, told with every kind of novelistic grace: structure, dialogue, psychology, descriptions, pace, revelation. It was tremendously exciting, but also psychologically acute about the disaffection and despair in American lives. Dismissed by some critics as a "faction" – a queasy mix of fact and fiction which did neither idiom any favours – it raises a question for literary historians. Was it here that Mailer, and subsequent writers, became interested in real American lives – reported, not imagined -- as the real subject of the Great American Novel?
Meanwhile, the search for the elusive prize went on. Cormac McCarthy, born 10 years after Mailer, plunged into the mythic territory of the apocalyptic western with Blood Meridian and the Border trilogy. Toni Morrison took a similar dive into history with Beloved, based on the story of a woman who murdered her children in 1856 to stop them being taken back into slavery. It won the Pulitzer prize. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, bang up to date, was the closest thing to a condition-of-America novel that anyone had seen in decades: a Zola-ish multi-strand social drama of class, racism and political greed in 1980s Manhattan. Even if the book did not "clarify the nation's vision of itself", everybody bought and read it – and, like Mailer before him, Wolfe issued a nannyish warning to fellow novelists that they were artists without a real subject; but now he'd shown them the way, he said, they should begin writing fictions about the Zeitgeist.
Don DeLillo's White Noise, about an America of academic "Hitler studies", poison in the atmosphere and the search for an anti-death serum, was followed by the massive Underworld, a rambling, lyrical history of America from 1950s to 1990s, which starts with a baseball game (an echo of Roth's Great American Novel) and confronts the Cuban missile crisis: there are walk-on parts for Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce and J Edgar Hoover, and much agonising about nuclear technology and fractured identity. Gingerly, cautiously, the San Francisco Chronicle called it, "Perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a Great American Novel." The indefinite article seemed to represent a lessening of ambitions in the literary universe.
By the 1990s, a trio of novelists had established themselves as the next big thing. They were known as the Brat Pack, they were cool and hung out in the swankiest clubs: Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, along with their Anglo-Indian publisher, Sonny Mehta of Knopf. Curiously, the trio all seemed to be writing the same novel, in which a gang of madcap, cocktail-swilling Manhattanites chat and party and completely fail to notice a heinous moral outrage taking place under their noses (Less Than Zero, Brightness Falls, A Cannibal in Manhattan.) Perhaps they were making a collective bid to write the great American novel, by updating one of the leading contenders for the title, The Great Gatsby.
When the sensibility of literary America, like the Manhattan skyline, was changed for ever by 9/11, a bracing corrective blast to US novelists came from an English critic. James Wood, who has since emigrated to New York and joined the New Yorker magazine, dismissed the McInerney generation as trivial and mediocre writers, "for whom Manhattan is a tinkle of restaurants", and called for a return to novels which were concerned with people, rather than stuffed with otiose learning: "Indeed 'knowing about things' has become one the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again, novelists are praised for the wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge... The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result – in America at least – is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being." Writing about the everyday, he concluded, was a sure way of becoming outdated very fast.
In 2006, still in search of the elusive GAN, the New York Times wrote to 200 writers "and other literary sages" and asked them to nominate the best single work of American fiction in the past 25 years. By a mile, the answer was Beloved by Toni Morrison, closely followed by DeLillo's Underworld, then McCarthy's Blood Meridian, then Updike's Rabbit quartet and Roth's American Pastoral – one of the key books of his astonishing, late-flowering rebirth. The lesson seemed clear. The Great American Novel should be a consideration of an historical event with grave resonances for the modern age; it will be centrally concerned with outrages against human rights, or the suspicion that beneath the smooth surface of American life, dangerous impulses still lurk unseen. It will be obsessed with death and, perhaps in consequence, display few traces of humour. And its author will be someone born no later than 1940. An astonishing detail of the New York Times's top 20 was that 90 per cent of the authors were the old guard, born in the 1930s: Morrison, Roth, DeLillo, Updike, McCarthy. There was no sign anywhere of the Brat Pack, or of newer literary darlings such as William Vollman, David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers.
Where is the Great American Novel to be found today? Does anyone still care enough about writing an unprecedented masterpiece, to amaze and dismay his or her rival scribes, and offer the world a metaphor of America that will stick? There are talented middle-aged novelists around, such as Jonathan (The Corrections) Franzen, Jeffrey (The Virgin Suicides) Eugenides, David (Snow Falling on Cedars) Guterson, Jonathan (Motherless Brooklyn) Lethem and Donna (The Secret History) Tartt, all in their forties, but none has published any new fiction for four or five years. In the trendy purlieus of McSweeney's magazine, the popular and best-selling David Eggers's career has taken an interesting turn. Last year he published What is the What: the Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, the true story of one of the "lost boys of Sudan" whose family and village were destroyed in the Sudanese civil war, and who, after living in refugee camps, landed in the US. Its creative blend of fact and fiction derives from Mailer's experiments in The Executioner's Song and In the Belly of the Beast; Eggers, though he might not welcome the comparison, perhaps comes closest to Mailer's most typical idiom – and, in doing do, offers a unique insight into America as seen through the eyes of a traumatised outsider, in the great tradition of immigrant fiction.
Among younger writers, the signs aren't great. In March this year, Granta unveiled its second list of Best Young American Novelists (the first was in 1996,) bringing to the thunderstruck fiction-reading world a lot of strikingly unfamiliar names: Judy Budnitz, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, ZZ Packer, Kevin Brockmeier. Only Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer in the line-up have reputations as novelists outside America. Closer inspection revealed some interesting details: the vast majority of the 20 have emerged from university "writing programs". Two-thirds of them were educated at virtually identical liberal-arts colleges. The judges' chairman and Granta editor, Ian Jack, explained that the cut-off age for being considered a "young" novelist has shifted from 40 to 35, because "people seemed to be writing (and publishing) fiction sooner", and that taking up fiction "is increasingly seen as a career choice by Americans in their early twenties, who attend universities to learn it...".
The backgrounds of the authors were intriguing, too – a third of them were born or raised outside America, in Russian, China, India, Peru and Thailand. Subject-wise, the young writers seemed (for such young people) morbidly obsessed by death; images of loss and extinction turn up everywhere in their work. A curious social nervousness was also noticeable, in the number of stories about young, privileged Americans encountering foreigners for the first time, often in the developing world. "All of us judges agreed on one thing," wrote Ian Jack. "Ethnicity, migration and 'abroad' had replaced social class as a source of tension." Analysing class, as Updike and Ford once did so brilliantly, is no longer an acceptable subject in US fiction.
One can over-sentimentalise the idea of the novelist as passionate adventurer, whose prose is inspired or sharpened by some dark experience (such as war.) It's mostly a foolish dream. But one can feel a lowering of the spirits when confronted by the spectacle of the descendants of Bellow and Roth, Updike and Mailer – the creative-department students whose impulse to write derives mostly from feeding off other books, who would rather fashion a short story, good though it may be, rather than attempt a balls-out epic novel. "The originators, the exuberant men, are gone," wrote Evelyn Waugh about the English novel in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, "and in their place subsists and modestly flourishes, a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance." The older generation of great American scribes, the exuberant men and women, are going at alarming speed; and with them goes the dream of the Great American Novel that focused and energised them all.
It's like seeing the faces on Mount Rushmore replaced by snapshots on Facebook. Here, for instance, is Christopher Coake, one of the new BYAs, describing his response to being nominated: "Here, I'll tell you what it's like to be on Granta's Best Young American Novelists list: you spend a long time fussing around with your blog posts, knowing you're supposed to be terrific at self-expression, before shrugging and copping out with an ellipsis... Now I'd better go and write something."
Do you hear that noise? It's Norman Mailer, bunching his fists, six feet underground.
