What is the Great American Novel?
>>25588204Reminds me of all the people trying to make it big on YT.
Why do Americans need to have the Great American X in everything. I will never understand that place, thankfully.
>>25588412Americans are a "race" raised off action figures and shark-jumping media, everything they consume MUST be the ULTIMATE
John Dos Passos. - USA trilogy and Adventures of Augie March by Bellow seem to have been forgotten as of late.William Vollmann should be given props for squeezing a contender out before he dies from colon cancer. Hopefully it provokes new wave of white-fucking-males to at least try to write "The Great American Novel".
>>25588204Gatsby is the boring stock answer for a reason
>>25588204The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers
>>25588449how is the new vollman have you read any
>>25588952Nta, but I'm about 120 pages into it (not even 4% in). So far after an intro section it's going back and forth between DAVE in Vietnam and starting out at the CIA in West Berlin and stasi documents to his home life with his stay at home wife. So far aside from establishing characters and his developing alienation in his two lives it'll have some really cutting or well written sentence that'll stand out from what practically feels like reading classified documents with everything having codenames or abbreviations. It also has a pretty good sense of humor so far too.
>>25588204It is really more of a genre. It started out as marketing but outside of marketing (and those who swallow the marketing) it is just any novel which does an exceedingly good job of representing the country at the time of its publication. Underworld is fantastic.
>>25588449>white-fucking-malesI cringed.Anyway, I read some of that Vollmann slop and it's just autisticlly describing historical events, mostly performative prose to make it seem more fiction-y, but actually just makes you become very aware of this imposed effect.Also, something like that doesn't really fit the "great American novel" aesthetic anyway. He should've just written a big novel about big-rig serial killers on the I-40 interstate and that would've better captured the American experience.
>i have the nicest spacing
>>25588204
>>25588204Don't worry, I'm working on it (I'm not even American).
