looking for next Great American novel: bullshit waste of time

If we're going to have one, i'm sticking with Huckleberry Finn, damn it.

I read this article in response to the death of Mailer, and am suspicious of the writer's assessment of the current batch of writers who just might one day be of Great American Writers. Blah.

(Lethem has definitely published within the past four or five years, even if i think his novel from 2007 sucks. And anyone seriously pegging hopes on Eggers? Come on.)

Has anyone stopped to assess why there is no great American novel approaching on the horizon? Maybe it's because America is over. The sentence seems important:

Analysing class, as Updike and Ford once did so brilliantly, is no longer an acceptable subject in US fiction.

In just fiction? No. It's not acceptable. Period. America is a nation in decline. We don't talk about that.

There is more:

Where is the Great American Novel to be found today? Does anyone still care enough about writing an unprecedented masterpiece, to amaze and dismay his or her rival scribes, and offer the world a metaphor of America that will stick?

A metaphor for America? Which America? The ideal America or the America we wound up with. Obviously with the current America, it is Elvis Presley dead on a toilet. Had they carved out his entrails and practiced extispicy upon his compacted colon, the faces of George W. Bush and the Clintons would have gurgled up from the undigested hamburger and peanut butter.

Don't cry for literature. It'll get along just fine without America. Look what it's much valued fetish for social realism brought it... not a damned thing. Peering at the skies through a microscope is self-induced myopia. Bring on the next experiment.