MONTAGE emphasize the chill of a fall night. Sachs. “Morton taught me how to see with wouldn’t pay for art school,” he explains, Though Reist dates his real career as a pencil,” Reist recalls. “I learned how to “but he would for business school.” But af- an artist to that moment on a Manhattan translate three dimensions to two, but in ter his M.B.A. and two years at Time, Inc., street, his artistic roots trace back to his a way you could still see the three dimen- he became a full-time painter. It wasn’t al- childhood in Peru, where his father was sions.” Sachs encouraged Reist to consider ways smooth sailing; he worked part-time an American military attaché married to painting as a career. as a consultant and taught business at a a Peruvian. Reist began painting in prep Though he was accepted by Rhode Is- local college. “There was some good luck school; in college, the Adams resident took land School of Design, financial consid- involved,” he recalls, “but success enables a House course on life drawing taught erations led him to matriculate instead more success. You can take chances if you by Boston University professor Morton at Harvard Business School. “My dad are successful.” vsteve potter American things such as the great Ameri- Made in the U.S.A. can sewing-machine, the great American public school, and the great American Fiction and critique of American society sleeping-car.” It was enough of a cliché by adam kirsCh by 1880 for Henry James to refer to it with the acronym “GAN,” which Buell employs throughout his book. he phrase “The Great American the Great American Novel without a tinc- Yet Buell warns us against taking all this Novel” means something more ture of irony these days. But as Lawrence dismissal at face value: “critical pissiness than the sum of its parts. There Buell shows in The Dream of the Great Ameri- suggests the persistence of some sort of hy- T are plenty of great American novels can Novel, his comprehensive and illuminat- drant,” as he puts that are not Great American Novels: Henry ing new study, that is nothing new: Ameri- it. Even today, Lawrence Buell, The James’s Portrait of a Lady doesn’t qualify, and can writers have always held the phrase in our endlessly Dream of the Great American neither does Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also at arm’s length, recognizing in it a kind of self-conscious Novel (Harvard Univer- Rises, or Willa Cather’s The Lost Lady, even hubris, if not mere boosterism. Almost as literary era, nov- sity Press, $39.95) though everyone acknowledges them as clas- soon as the concept of the Great Ameri- elists are still sics. No, the Great American Novel—always can Novel was invented, in the nation- writing candidates for the GAN. What else capitalized, like the United States of building years after the are Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, or Philip America itself—has to be a book that Civil War, Buell finds it Roth’s American Pastoral, or Don DeLillo’s contains and explains the whole being mocked, noting Underworld, if not attempts to capture the country, that makes sense of a place that one observer dryly essence of American modernity between that remains, after 230-odd years, a put it into the same cat- two covers? mystery to itself. If other countries egory as “other great Buell, now Cabot research professor of don’t fetishize their novels in quite American literature, does not spend much this way—if the French don’t sit time theorizing about the Great American around waiting for someone to write Novel. Instead, he seeks to illuminate the Great French Novel—it may be the concept by analyzing some of the because no country is so much in books that have laid claim to need of explanation. the title. Most of these are, Hardly anyone talks about by definition, mainstays of high-school and col- lege syllabi, from Na- thaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter down to Toni Morrison’s Be- loved. But alongside these classics, Buell ranges a number of lesser-known works, showing how the ba- sic “scripts” of the Great Ameri- can Novel are played out by writers like Helen Hunt Jackson in Ramona and Harold Fredric in The Damnation of Theron Ware. And he takes account of contemporary works that respond to, challenge, and rewrite the classics, such as Illustration by Miguel Davilla Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, a paro- dy of Gone With the Wind. Gone With the Wind is not what most peo- C hapter & Verse ple would think of as a Great American Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words Novel—surely it is too middlebrow, not to mention too racist, for that distinction. Lorna Hallal seeks the title and au- quotation widely attributed to Friedrich But as Buell points out, the themes Mar- thor of a work that describes children Nietzsche: “To forget one’s purpose is garet Mitchell writes about—slavery, the queuing for the gas chamber while a palm the commonest form of stupidity.” weight of Southern history, “the old-order reader tells their fortunes. The refrain is mystique”—are the same as those of an “the wrong parents, the wrong parents.” “no moral right to decide” (No- undoubted GAN, William Faulkner’s Ab- vember-December 2013). Charles Ha- salom, Absalom. (The difference is that “for John Gordon writes, “I remember gen found “We have no right morally to every reader of Absalom, fifty had readGone reading somewhere that after the 1746 decide as a matter of opinion that which With the Wind.”) Buell proposes that GAN Battle of Culloden, a British officer was can be determined as a matter of fact” candidates tend to follow a few major informed that a mother and her children in Industrial Leadership (chapter 4, “Re- “scripts,” and Faulkner and Mitchell are were outside his quarters looking for a sults of Task Work,” pages 88-89), the both using the same one: novels that seek place to spend the night, to which he published version of management con- to explain America by “imagining across responded, irritably, ‘Oh, hang ’em!’ The sultant H.L. Gantt’s Page Lecture series or from within” the country’s major social next morning he was startled to find delivered at Yale in 1915. divisions, especially the divisions between that they had all been, literally, hanged. I black and white, and between North and would appreciate a source on this.” Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter South. and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware The GAN candidates that follow this Pete Hawkins wonders whether any- Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail script manage to remain controversial one can provide a definitive citation for a to [email protected]. even as they attain the status of classics. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is Buell’s first example: a huge bestseller see her returned to slavery—means that They are “sprawling performances of en- on publication in 1852, it was credited by it remains a far more challenging and re- cyclopedic scope with multiple agendas some with helping to hasten the Civil War, fractory work than, say, Huckleberry Finn, from the ethnographic to the metaphysi- thanks to its frontal assault on slavery. Yet another example of this GAN “script.” cal.” But where the democratic crew of as Buell notes, the book tries hard to de- Buell quotes Morrison’s own feeling that, the Pequod is destroyed by the monoma- pict slavery as a national problem, while in Beloved, she was treating an aspect of nia of Captain Ahab, the cast of USA—12 sparing Southern sensitivities: Stowe American history that “the characters characters drawn from across the range of “makes her arch villain a New Englander,” don’t want to remember, I don’t want to socioeconomic types—are dragged down while “she makes her most brainy and ar- remember, black people don’t want to re- by the mediocrity and money-madness of ticulate white character a slaveholder.” member, white people won’t want to re- pre-Depression America. Though her depictions of black characters member.” As Buell cannily notes, the language of now strike us as deeply racist, “essential- Yet as Buell insists, the GAN has always the characters in USA is not “the speech izing…Africans as inherently childlike,” thrived by criticizing American society, of the people,” as Dos Passos claims, but a Buell urges us to consider the novel as a not by celebrating it. “Great American manufactured “slanguage,” showing how “white person’s attempt to comprehend Novels are not expected to be rituals of Americans’ minds have been colonized by nonwhites at a moment when even most self-congratulation like July 4 celebrations “newsreel argot and the platitudes of pro- white northerners considered them less or Hollywood melodramas,” he writes. fessional wordsmiths.” Unlike Steinbeck’s than fully human.” “On the contrary, the historical record Okies, who are described in a poetic plural Uncle Tom’s Cabin inaugurates a long suggests that serious contenders are much of “groupthink, grouptalk,” Dos Passos’s tradition of GANs that try to bridge the more likely to insist that national great- people seem atomized: “social interaction racial divide—though later, more sophis- ness is unproven, that its pretensions are becomes much more diffuse, fleeting, hap- ticated works would focus on the ways it hollow, and that the ship of state is going penstance, compartmentalized, abstract, remained unbridgeable.