The great big American novel

The "great American novel" is a form which Americans respect, not only because it seems equal to the "grandeur" and size of the country and the universal implications of its history, but because in some way its looseness, its broodingness, its very size seem about to yield up the secret, the essential truth of American life.

Alfred Kazin, "The Great American Bore," Contemporaries

Alfred Kazin

For decades in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of the great American novel referred not so much to literary greatness as size. A great novel had to be huge, or so we can assume from the thickness of so many of the novels being produced by American writers of this period. Literary critic Alfred Kazin examined this assumption in his hard-hitting 1958 essay "The Great American Bore."

Most of those hits were directed at John O'Hara and his massive novel From the Terrace which had just been published. I don't know that I have ever read a book review as negative as this one.

Kazin called the novel "mercilessly repetitive and meaninglessly detailed."

He said it "makes no great demand on anyone's mental faculties."

"There is no plot, no dramatic unity of any kind to enforce suspense or even tension," he wrote.

The book, he said, "is simply a large piece of American history in our time, ripped out of the reference books."


Mostly Kazin focused on the novel's length: "Nine hundred pages! Nine hundred pages of characters who appear for a paragraph and are forgotten; nine hundred pages of rapacious females who talk about sex like college sophomores discovering that 'sex is nothing but sensation anyway.' Nine hundred pages of detail about rich men's stables, what workmen ate for lunch in a Pennsylvania steel mill in 1900, of careful notations about lemon phosphates and who was mad at whom and who slept with whom, and what people ate at a prep-school lunch in the 1920s ..."

O'Hara was not alone in churning out these massive, door-stopper novels. Kazin refers to Thomas Wolfe, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and other writers. He could also have mentioned lesser writers such as James Michener, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins and any number of others from that period when bigness seemed to equate to importance or value or even greatness in the eyes of publishers, readers and even the authors themselves.

Long novels are still being written, of course. I usually read one or more such novels each year. Sometimes they seem padded, other times they tell stories equal to the length of the books. Yet when I enter a bookstore today, as I in fact hope to do later today, I don't have the sense that size dominates story in the books I see on shelves and tables. Great American novels are still being written, but great size no longer appears to be the primary objective.