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Why do people still use the term “Great American Novel”?
It isn’t just a cliché but obsolete: a relic of that testosterone-fueled era when Norman Mailer and others “fancied themselves in the boxing ring with Hemingway, delivering a succession of body blows to Papa and other writers of his celebrated generation,” as the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote.
Or so I argued in a recent piece that struck a chord with readers. People seemed intuitively to grasp its main point: The idea of the Great American novel has become a casualty of more than movies and the diversity of voices finding their way into print. It competes for attention with a boom in narrative nonfiction that at its best holds its own against high-quality fiction.
I was thinking of nonfiction like David Grann’s The Wager, Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. Those books dealt with different topics — a shipwreck, schizophrenia, and the opioid epidemic — but all were better than most of the recently published novels I’ve read.