My Favorite American Novels

I think the best American novels that I have ever read are the following:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952); The Post-War Generation’s Great American Novel
Underworld by Don DeLillo (1996); The Boomers’ Great American Novel
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1997); Gen X’s Great American Novel
James by Percival Everett (2024); The Millennials’ Great American Novel

But what makes a book especially American and why these?

Based on some decades being born in America, loving America, leaving America, wrestling with America from her more conservative regions to her more liberal regions, I think the great threads of our national culture center on the following timeless questions. To be a great American novel, the novel must tackle the following topics:

Materialism: How does a nation of such incredible wealth have such intractable poverty that is (seemingly) winkingly tolerated under a rubric of social Darwinism?
Religion: How does a nation that purports to be pluralistic in its religious quilt deal with the fact that one religion is prima inter pares? And how does evangelical Christianity square with the deeper religion that seems to drive her citizenry: capitalism? And when that religion demands social Darwinism against a religious preference that demands service to the destitute, how do the adherents simply look away in their hypocrisy?
The Shadow of Slavery: While there’s certainly some room for historians to disagree about the purpose of America and its bond to the peculiar institution, there’s no doubt that many of the institutions and edifices of our “free” continent are inextricably tied to slavery; whose hands built the White House and Wall Street? On top of that, Americans and precious few of her leaders are willing to stare this historical bubo on our body politic square on and build/present a narrative on how to treat it

Perhaps most importantly, these pillars need to interact with each other and use each other to reveal the deeper truths of America. Let me examine these levers at play in my selections.

Chosen Books

Consider Invisible Man, where our narrator uses material (i.e. the cost of electricity to light bulbs, or #1, above) as an attack on a system that refuses to reckon with its enslaved past (#3), as he is played for a pawn between communist insurgents and capitalist defenders of the status quo (and his invisibility or lower-class status).

Underworld does something that I’ve seen precious little art actually do: make the Boomers reckon with their profligacy and utter waste of world-historical material wealth. In Underworld, the generation that was told in The Graduate to opt for plastics while advocating flower power is momentarily forced to reckon that they simply made too much shit and the entire, literal planet may fail due to their perceived right to material ease.¹ Along that way, the bridge generation between those who fought Nazis and those who stand as silent judges to the way they sold out their youthful principles glosses over material disparity and embraces an ever more socially Darwinist construction of America.

As a late GenX-er or an early-Millennial, I have a foot in both generational camps, but when I read Infinite Jest I knew I was reading the great American novel of my older cousin.² In Wallace, like DeLillo, the material stuff that the Boomers left everywhere has also reached farcically awful condition (it must be launched by industrial slingshot into Quebec). I think Wallace largely skirts race because he’s caught up in the Clinton-era notion of racial progress being achieved by virtue of big capital smushing all citizens into commercial development opportunities. Flattened into one big pool of attention designed to be gotten and trapped, Wallace then takes some of the interesting economic upshots from Invisible Man and James and then applies them to everyone. And there, in his dystopian future, Wallace tracks two stories: a story of an entertainment so engrossing people would rather die than stop watching and a story of drug addicts recovering in a halfway house. They have the same mechanics and are the same thing. This is the new religion he sees for America: capitalism but the main things sold is our attention and our lives (so prescient). Christianity is absent except by its absence. To whatever degree it can be found it is in the form of two forms of apology: a beautiful nude young woman repeatedly apologizing for the mess that this whole world is (“The Entertainment”) and/or the higher-power summoning steps of 12-step programs. Remember, both the attention-addicted and the drug-addicted are following the same path out of Hell.

In James the shadow of slavery is clear, but in his fever dream dialogue with Cundegonde, she points out that James’ liberty is antithetical to capital because, like John Deere tractors, he was mortgaged equipment. This dynamic explains how there could be good Christian slave-holders: just-so tales (the slave is happy in his bondage!) or the truth that many prefer Mammon to the Carpenter.

Footnotes

For those who might quibble, this generation was so impressed by its own history that they gave us a TV show called thirtysomething as they turned thirty and waged inter-generational gaslighting on GenX/Y by fetishizing their own youths and music on TV (The Wonder Years) when it was barely 15 years behind them? Judging by the accumulation of (second) houses, boats, bank accounts in this cohort and their willingness to use regulatory capture to ensure their hold on being this most-special cohort (see elections since 2012), it doesn’t seem likely to happen.
She took me to see E.T., she saw original lineup Van Halen, she was the age of every girl in Valley Girl or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. This is their book, but it also prefigures my cohort too.