Book Review: The Dream of the Great American Novel by Lawrence Buell

The Dream of the Great American Novel
Nonfiction by Lawrence Buell
Belknap Press, February 2014
ISBN-13: 978-0674051157
$39.95; 584pp.
Reviewed by Clinton Peters

It’s hard to encapsulate a far-reaching, ambitious doorstop like Lawrence Buell’s Dream of the Great American Novel. But there is something akin to John McPhee completing his twenty-year-plus opus on geology, Annals of the Former World,with fact-numbing and surprisingly page-turning precision. Like McPhee, Buell has shaped an almanac for those who are intrigued by the poetry and sublime nature of cataloguing all that has come before.

Buell sets out to lasso the meaning behind the last two hundred years of American novels. For this enterprise, a reader is required to have at least a season’s background in the trenches of criticism. If you happen to be an English graduate student or speak enough of the jargon (“agency,” “bildungsroman,” etc.) and really want a swath of Americanism, this, fellow plebeian, is the ark for you.

An Americanist guru, Buell is considered a pioneer in ecocriticism and has earned a reputation for his work on Emerson; he is suited to pen The Dream of the Great American Novel. But there are plenty of voices Buell engages with, plenty of theory angles and histographies, which if anything, even given the book’s brick-like nature, make the book feel weighty with the cacophony of other critics.

Despite the contentiousness of this premise, Buell is skeptical and self-reflective in his pursuit of the GAN. Dozens of pages are taken up explaining what the hell a “Great American Novel” could be, even in idea. Surprisingly, according to Buell, few other countries have histories of obsessing over their self-identifying novels. In 1868, John DeForest advertised the phrase “Great American Novel” as a challenge to fellow stateside writers to take up the pen and trounce European sneering. Buell employs DeForest’s war cry as a lens to examine the trajectory of American fiction.

What do we find? Some usual suspects: Huck Finn’s understated complexity, Hawthorne’s meteoric fame, Beloved’s collective, perhaps national, grief, Absalom Absalom!’s tepid foray into race. TheseBuell inspects along with scores of books left behind or remembered (including a book about a whale), and a few surprises such as Buell’s personal take on Phillip Roth that may change your opinion on the “penis with a thesaurus.”

Much of the fun is salivating before Buell announces his dredging up of forgotten gems that you only thought you’d read. A taste: have you ever wondered about Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and why its hype evaporated? You’ll see.

This is an excellent book if you’re just getting your eyes dirty in the muck of Americanism. The obvious critic could bash the discussion of a great American anything. But that barb would miss what this book is about: providing a successful onramp to investigating, critically, many of the juggernauts in U.S. literature and what they say about our young nation.

A native Texan, Clinton Peters has an MFA from the University of Iowa in nonfiction where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He is pursuing a PhD at the University of North Texas and has work published or forthcoming in Upstreet, American Literary Review, Antimuse, The Drunken Odyssey, and Ethos and writes regularly for AMRI. Previously he was an English teacher in Japan, an outdoor wilderness guide and a radio DJ.