Eight Great American Novels

Whether we can all agree on what makes a novel a great American one is another story (considering we can’t agree on much these days). To me, Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife” fits the description. It’s the fictionalized story of Laura Bush’s life, about a woman married to an entitled, charismatic Republican politician with whom she privately disagrees on certain very public issues. Sittenfeld deftly situates the problems of patriarchy and class politics within an intimate, decades-long love story—and what is more American than that potent mix? Well, my colleagues have some suggestions. Below, New Yorker staffers each chose a Great American Novel.

America is a nation of believers, and improvement is our creed: that tomorrow’s success will avenge today’s suffering. Nathanael West’s 1933 novella, as short as that other great parable of faith, the Book of Job, is its American inversion. The pseudonymous title character, a depressed, drunken, belligerent twenty-six-year-old advice columnist, has no real hardships of his own and is cursed by doubt. Because he cannot bring himself to lend hope, however false, to his desperate correspondents (all beset by the truly Job-like trials of Depression-era New York—most memorably, a teen-age girl born without a nose), he seeks relief in gin, sex, and an ironic, superficial Christianity. His tormentor is his terribly encouraging editor, Shrike (an “American Satan,” per Harold Bloom), who does nothing more severe than taunt him with cutting, decadent parody. A dagger of a novel, brief and lethal, “Miss Lonelyhearts” is the great American apostasy—West reminds us that life does scant giving, and much taking away.—Nicholas Henriquez, director of editorial infrastructure

It seems to me that the Great American Novel must necessarily be one of expatriation. And nothing conveys our national image quite like a white, middle-aged man establishing a utopian matriarchal colony in the penetralia of the Kalahari to prove his academic hypothesis about the affirmative potential of feminist socialist coöperation––a close second might be a woman ambling Christlike for days through the desert to reach said outpost in order to bed the older, married social scientist responsible for its founding. “Mating,” the first novel that Norman Rush published, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1991, begins, Americanly, “In Africa, you want more, I think.” A five-hundred-page ekphrastic soliloquy in the voice of an overeducated former Minnesotan, a comedy of manners, a glossary of neologisms, a referendum on anthropology and a great work of it, and an ecstatic love story, Rush’s lush matrix of contradictions, like our own feckless, obdurate, sometimes beautiful country, ends up exactly where it started.—Holden Seidlitz, fact checker