Great American Novel
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Have You Met Stoner? July 08, 2024
It is a book both well-known and unknown, which is a weird thing to say. It is known by its devotees, of course, and by people who care a lot about 20th-century American literature. But it is not known by the general public — as The Great Gatsby, say...
Zach Bryan Won't Be Your Jukebox Hero July 05, 2024
I happen to believe that great American novels are written by osmosis, an accumulation of the stories you hear if you spend enough time in your neighborhood bar. At least that’s my excuse. I go to the Lighthouse Tavern, where the carpets are stained,...
Garth Risk Hallberg Takes On the Life-and-Times Novel May 28, 2024
The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognitio...
From Misogyny to No Man's Land May 13, 2024
In 1963, Mary McCarthy published The Group. A ranging social novel that follows eight female friends after their graduation from Vassar College in 1933, The Group was a smashing success, soaring to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and b...
The Great American Novels March 15, 2024
In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting th...
Under the Surface March 14, 2024
Percival Everett’s James is being marketed as a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but—in keeping with Everett’s history as a jazz musician—it’s more like an improvisation on Twain’s theme. In the original, considered by many to be the ...
In the Details: Don DeLillo’s Library of America volumes November 08, 2023
In 1979, at the age of forty-two, the distinctly American writer Don DeLillo made a change that would have a profound impact on his work: he left the United States. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that year —his first accolade after a decade’s run of...
Contemplating Cormac McCarthy November 02, 2023
I first encountered Cormac McCarthy’s name in an interview between Gus Van Sant and the late David Foster Wallace. The interview is very late-’90s, and it fills me with nostalgia for a time when the status quo relationship to art in America was not p...
The Longest, Least-Remembered Great American Novel October 25, 2023
During the Second Great Awakening, the wave of religious fervor that spread through America in the early nineteenth century, a self-proclaimed prophet named John George Rapp founded the town of Harmony, Indiana. Around 1820, his followers built a lab...
At Home With Joyce Carol Oates July 14, 2023
"Whimsy” is not a word often associated with Joyce Carol Oates, the five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, social media provocateur, and notoriously prolific chronicler of America’s cracked, calamitous heart. So the vision that greets visitors at the ent...
(Re)Introducing The Napkin Project July 11, 2023
Bars have a way of attracting storytellers—of both the professional and the hobbyist variety. For every barfly unspooling a wandering yarn to friends new and old, there’s another alone in the corner booth, held fast in the grip of creativity’s lightn...
Riding Shotgun to the End of the World June 28, 2023
After Cormac McCarthy’s death last week, we can see the contours of his novel, The Passenger, a bit more clearly. Upon first reading it, it felt like a last book, which it indeed turned out to be: a suitable swan song for one of the last authentic gr...
The Rugged Individualism of Cormac McCarthy June 28, 2023
American novelists in the 20th century used to be celebrities and, perhaps, men: Hemingway, certainly Faulkner. Now, they might as well not exist, in a situation that might be worse than the 19th century one that led Melville to die drunk and forgott...
A Conversation with the Thalidomide Kid June 28, 2023
The temptation is to shut one’s eyes and throw a cloak over Noah’s nakedness,” the reviewer said. “Play the dutiful son to one of America’s greatest novelists.”They sat in the diner’s only corner booth. The reviewer was drinking black coffee. The Tha...
The Undiscovered Country June 26, 2023
Cormac McCarthy died last week at 89, leaving behind as provocative a body of work as any American novelist. His writing has always had fervent admirers, even his early Tennessee novels, written in thrall to William Faulkner, that initially sold few ...
Knowledge and Science in Cormac McCarthy June 19, 2023
The publication of The Passenger and Stella Maris seems almost like an undeserved gift. The recently deceased Cormac McCarthy’s career has spanned fifty-five years, and certainly, in writing as an octogenarian, the literary giant had nothing more to ...
Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom June 15, 2023
The act of writing was its own reward for McCarthy. In a long career, he gave few interviews, and rarely explained himself. He didn’t make himself known. I can’t say that I love everything he wrote. Sometimes, when his prose enters the Biblical regis...
Remembering Cormac McCarthy June 15, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning genius behind such indelible American novels as Suttree, Blood Meridian, and The Road, along with his most accessible work, The Border Trilogy, has died in Santa Fe at age 89.Too often touted as a successor...
Cormac McCarthy Is Dead at 89 June 14, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism ...
Cormac McCarthy’s New Books of Revelation January 16, 2023
Major publishing events are rare in our day and age of irreconcilable cultural chasms between left and right. Not many living American writers compel something resembling a consensus on their greatness anymore, and those that do tend to be very old. ...
Mathematical Tragedy: On McCarthy’s 'Stella Maris' January 06, 2023
By the end of his 2022 novel The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy conjured quite a difficult problem for himself. If that book’s separately published coda, Stella Maris, is to be an extended study of the sister of Robert Western, protagonist of The Passeng...
Reenchanted Science December 23, 2022
But dreams die hard. In McCarthy’s pair of new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, they don’t die at all—neither the dreams of his characters, whose ectoplasmic residue is constantly dripping across the boundary between reality and hallucination,...
I Was There to Inflict Death December 22, 2022
‘I have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages,’ Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris, the second of two novels by Cormac McCarthy published this autumn. The leader of these phantoms is called the Thalidomid...
Great, Beautiful, Terrifying: On Cormac McCarthy December 20, 2022
Cormac McCarthy’s latest offering—in that word’s fundamentally spiritual sense—is The Passenger and its coda or addendum, Stella Maris. One is prompted to read The Passenger first (it came out in October) and Stella Maris second (it came out in Decem...
The Fate of the Western’s World December 19, 2022
Cormac McCarthy, who hadn't published a novel since 2006, has suddenly become as prolific as James Patterson. October saw the publication of The Passenger, and its companion work, Stella Maris, appeared earlier this month. Reviews of the former have ...
