The Great American Novels: A List from The Atlantic, My Take, Part One

March 23, 2024 at 9:18 pm (Uncategorized) (Book review, fiction)

Here’s a link to the list of Great American Novels. The editors have prefaced it with an explanation of how they arrived at these titles.

As I perused the selections, I couldn’t help but categorize them in terms of what I’ve read and loved, tried to read and couldn’t, and just plain haven’t read.

Right off the bat, I can tell you, three of the first four are novels for which I have the deepest reverence: The Great Gatsby, Death Comes for the Archbishop. and An American Tragedy.

I read Gatsby – reread it, actually – so I could present it to a book group in tandem with a contemporary novel. The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian is a sort of riff on the plot of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. To say I disliked it would be a colossal understatement. But I had to read it all the way through, in order to successfully do my part for the book group. I was gritting my teeth the whole time.

Needless to say, it was experiences like this that contributed to putting me off book discussion groups.

I’ve never written about Death Comes for the Archbishop, but let me just say that this is a novel of luminous beauty. It takes place in New Mexico, a land that fascinates me. I’ve read it twice and will probably read it again. Just recently I read My Antonia. I enjoyed it also. Cather is a marvelous writer. I highly recommend both of these novels, and also The Professor’s House, which is also a wonderful book discussion choice.

I read An American Tragedy in conjunction with Stranger Than Fiction, a true crime literature course that I presented several years ago to a lifelong learning group. I’d been warned that Dreiser’s prose tended to be somewhat clunky, and so it proved. But oddly enough, that seemed to add to the novel’s raw power. The way the story builds to the moment when Clyde, the hapless protagonist, must decide what to do about the existential dilemma in which he finds himself – well, my heart was pounding; I was filled with dread even though I knew what was going to happen. The fact that the novel is based on an actual occurrence served to make it even more heartbreaking.

The film A Place in the Sun is based on the events recounted in Dreiser’s novel. This is a brilliant film. There’s a scene where Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor are dancing at a social event, and he confesses his feelings for her. This is what he says:

“I love you. I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I’ve even loved you before I saw you.”

Rarely has a downfall been more poignantly foretold.