'The Grapes of Wrath' endures

In No Time to Spare, a collection of short essays from her blog, Ursula K. Le Guin twice addresses the subject of The Great American Novel, which she abbreviates to TGAN. Mostly she resists the notion, not just of designating one great American novel but also of making lists of the greatest novels. Such attempts, she writes, omit genre writing (she mostly wrote science fiction) and tend to favor male writers from the eastern half of the United States.

"But mostly because I didn't and don't think we have much idea of what's enduringly excellent until it's endured," she says. "Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with."

The passage of time is important not just for individual novels but for a nation's literature itself. For a long time after the colonies were settled and after the nation was founded, American literature was not regarded highly, not even by Americans. Americans who read mostly read books imported from Europe, mostly England. Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens and others were the writers that mattered, the ones taught in American schools and checked out of American libraries.

Gradually writers like Emerson, Poe, Twain and Melville raised the possibility that such a thing as a great American novel might exist, if not yet, then some day. Henry James, an American who spent most of his life in England and was respected on both sides of the Atlantic, helped raise the stature of American literature, as did a host of other writers who emerged in the 20th century. And so people started to talked about The Great American Novel, one piece of fiction that not just represented the nation and what it stands for but also can stand up proudly in comparison with the best Great Britain or France has produced.

Given what Le Guin writes about the very notion of TGAN, it is surprising that she actually nominates a contender for that title. Actually she nominates two, but she has little to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her main focus is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which she says she reread in her old age and was more wowed by it than she was when she read it in her youth.

Steinbeck, perhaps because of his popularity especially with young readers, is usually overlooked whenever critics write on the subject of the best American novelists. William Faulkner, less read and less understood, rates higher with the intelligentsia.

Interestingly, Le Guin refers to Steinbeck as "Uncle John." He was not her uncle but the uncle of a college friend of hers, and she got to spend time in his company. Even so, not until she returned to Steinbeck's Depression novel decades later did she appreciate the novel's power.

She writes, "So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel ... a year ago I would have said -- for all its faults -- Huckleberry Finn. But now -- for all its faults -- I'd say The Grapes of Wrath."

After the passage of all those decades, it endures.