"The 'Great American Novel' continues

to be announced every year;

in good years there are generally several of them."

"Might as well get to work on the Great American Novel."

The first comment is by Edith Wharton,

writing in some annoyance in 1927,

the second by a fictional character

in the cult television series The Wire,

a veteran journalist facing the sack who bears more

than a passing resemblance to the show's creator, David Simon.

These remarks 80 years apart suggest two things, I think:

first, that in the United States it seems

as if a novel is never enough; and secondly,

that the novel -- although announced for as long

as there have been novels to announce --

has not yet been written.

Parodied almost as soon as it was conceived, always a tribute

to - as emphatic as it is ambiguous,

the Great American Novel, or GAN,

project has proved monumental.

It remains the benchmark

for literary ambition, prestige, and sales.

And it sometimes also feels

like fiction's equivalent of proper man's work.

As one reviewer put it, "There comes a time in the midlife

of every male American writer when he feels compelled

to make his big statement about the state of the union."

A recent example -- and I'm sure you'll guess [inaudible] --

is Jonathan Franzen, who,

following the publication of Freedom in 2010 was showcased

on the cover of Time magazine as "Great American Novelist."

"I always hated the expression," he said,

"mostly because I encountered it in stupid or sneering context."

Franzen was not the first writer

to approach the Great American Novel equivocally.

On the one hand, he chose to write a very long book

with a title suggesting national interrogation.

On the other, he seemed a bit embarrassed to have done so.

And indeed, for every writer who turns 40

and buys an extra-large stack of paper,

there is another admitting ruefully

to having outgrown his Ahab-like -- perhaps Ali-like --

obsession with a heavyweight book.

Bill Henderson, for example,

confessed that while once he'd thought

that in Planning Again he would be exposing the crucial

facts of the age -- things like Americans are greedy,

the Bomb is bad -- what he'd really wanted, he said,

was "literary stallionship."

For that reason, the GAN is also a bit of a joke,

as these deflating cartoons suggest.

And perhaps maturity, then, is deciding simply to scale back,

as it - another cartoon says,

and just write the Mediocre American Novel.

Or maybe all that's required is a display of some irony

about a still-lingering ambition --

say, by wearing a T-shirt inviting others to,

"Ask me about my Great American Novel."

I have some of this stuff as research.

But what was -- what still is -- the GAN?

It begins with the partial displacement of epic poetry

by the long novel in the second half of the 19th century

and extends, I would argue, to the partial displacement

of the novel in the 20th and 21st centuries by cinema

and other media, from D. W. Griffith's The Birth

of a Nation in 1915 through -- as I have already suggested --

to David Simon's Zolaesque "visual novel" --

his term -- The Wire.

And nowhere, I think, is the power of the idea

of the GAN more apparent, perhaps, than in its migration

from one medium to another.

But I also want to ask, "Why the Great American Novel?"

Exactly what needs -- social, political, aesthetic,

commercial -- does the enterprise serve?

Exactly what purposes might its realization be expected

to fulfill that so many writers have put

so much effort into realizing it?

And the obvious answer,

the answer that the writers themselves give,

concerns national identity.

One of the distinguishing features

of the Great American Novel is how explicitly, how loudly,

it announces that concern.

Through titles -- say, USA or Vineland

or even America America.

Through characters' names --

Christopher Newman in Henry James's The American,

Undine Spragg, whose initials, of course, are 'U.

S.' in Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and all sorts

of people whose names begin with an A,

such as Willa Cather's My Antonia, the girl -

the character notes, who seemed to mean to us the country.

The edges of text, conclusions and openings, also do a lot

of anxious work in signaling an author's desire

to belong to the GAN club.

Consider, then, the first episode of The Wire --

the first episode of the first series of The Wire.

We see a body and then the detective, McNulty,

on a stoop questioning a boy who has witnessed a murder.

McNulty asks why the boy and his friends kept playing dice

with the dead man even though they knew -

even after they knew he was a thief.

[ Video plays ]

>> I've got to ask you.

If every time, Snot Boogie [phonetic] would grab the money

and run away, why did you even let him in the game?

>> What?

>> I mean Snot Boogie always stole the money.

Why'd you let him play?

>> Got to.

This is America, man.

[ To end of scene ]

>> I'm sure everyone would

like to spend their lunch hour just watching The Wire.

But I mean - but I wouldn't say more about the scene except

to point out the way in which this brief exchange serves

as a kind of prelude to the series

or to the several series -- an announcement that what we are

about to watch is more than gritty neighborhood realism.

The Wire also has its eye on national allegory.

That episode was broadcast in 2002.

In 2006, the New York Times Book Review conducted a survey

in which they asked a group of luminaries

to name the single best work

of American fiction published in the last 25 years.

From 125 replies, the top five were: Morrison's Beloved,

15 votes; DeLillo's Underworld, 11;

McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Updike's tetralogy,

Rabbit Angstrom, with 8 each;

and Roth's American Pastoral with 7.

"To ask for the best work of American fiction,"

observes the paper's journalist A.O. Scott, "is not simply

to ask for the most beautifully written

or the most enjoyable to read.

The best works of fiction, according to our tally,

appear to be those that successfully assume a burden

of cultural importance.

They attempt not just the exploration

of particular imaginary people and places,

but also the illumination of epochs,

communities, of the nation itself.

America is not only their setting,

but also their subject."

And that last sentence sounds like a plausible definition

of the Great American Novel.

But for some people it bets a lot of questions.

What about America itself?

During the last 20 years or so,

critics have become increasingly uneasy with the idea

of an essential or exceptional American-ness expressed

in a unique fictional style or structure.

Surely, they argue, big novels

of national interrogation are a feature

of many literary traditions --

something that was pointed out by Shashi Tharoor

in his satirical The Great Indian Novel.

Moreover, they ask, aren't the most interesting novels those

that reflect our increasingly globalized lives?

Shouldn't we rather be reading hemispheric novels --

works like these, which I am going to talk about --

most notably though, perhaps,

Robert Bolano's total novel 2666, praised for its vision

of our terrifyingly post-national world?

I wonder, though, whether the opposition of national

and post-national fiction really makes a lot of sense.

National literatures, like nations, have always existed

in relation to one another.

And great American novelists have always used foreign models.

The first plea for the GAN --

which I'll discuss in a moment --

was for a realist with the scope of Balzac or Manzoni.

Later, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair openly emulated

Shincovich's Polish national trilogy.