The American Novel: Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Salinger Wanted

by Hilary Crowe

It’s 2:45 on a Wednesday afternoon and I’m slumped over my blank notebook sporting an equally blank expression, listening to a matronly Carolyn Parkhurst field carefully-worded questions on her tasteless tome, Lost and Found (it’s loosely based on the reality TV show The Amazing Race – need I say more?). Don’t read it – it’s absolute rubbish, kindling at best. But that’s beside the point.

There are few times that I have been as disappointed as when I received the reading list for my most anticipated pedagogical endeavor, "Writers in Print and Person." According to my advisor, it is quite the sought after class, and rarely are freshmen bestowed the honor of enrollment. But thanks to many hellish hours of Hawthorne, Hesse, and Hurston, my high school credits had finally amounted to something. Or so I thought. Four weeks and one and a half novels into the course, my hopes have been dashed; my faith in the future of American literature has been replaced with increasingly unmitigated cynicism.

Parkhurst’s pitiful excuse for a novel is only the beginning. I realize the class cannot exist without authors who are both alive and willing to speak to students about their “art,” but at least choose someone with culture, perspective, a voice and a wry world view; someone like Edward P. Jones, perhaps. What’s worse, my prospects of making it to 4:50 (the class is a torturous block) still alert and conscious look grim as the readings progress, or digress from literature as an art form, I should say. The way my professor describes these readings, which contain the introspection of young-adult fiction at best, irks me to no end. I may not know exactly what “literature,” “novel,” and “book” connote, but I do know that Hawthorne is literature, The Catcher in the Rye is a novel, and Lost and Found is just a book (again, at best).

As I was fighting back drool and day dreams, my mind wandered into a terrifyingly new low for my young writer’s mind to dwell upon: what if the great American novel, as a mode of capturing a generation’s sentiment or essence, is dead? I remembered an article I read in a fairly prominent monthly magazine some time ago (I don’t recall which) that postulated, with no certainty, who could be the next Salinger or Kerouac.

Months later there are still no contenders. What’s best is not always best selling. Of novels published in the past few years, I have yet to cross paths with any character that rivals the angst-ridden complexity of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, or the beautifully, subtly tragic Gatsby of Fitzgerald. I feel as though the art of writing to document a societal subgroup or snag in the fabric of the human psyche has been eschewed in favor of marketing, book signing, and courting silver screen adaptations. Perhaps people simply do not read as much. Perhaps, as we move toward our ever-digitalizing future, the soul-searching, thought-provoking, sophisticated leather-bound literature of drafty, ancient New England libraries no longer has a place in the world. I shudder to think that my children (if I were so inclined) may not know the pleasure of finding that hidden, dusty corner of the public library that house thousands of yellowing pages and privately perusing novels last checked out in 1956.

Parkhurst was inspired by television – reality television. Isn’t TV a copy of our lives? So, wouldn’t that make Lost and Found a copy of a copy? What happened to originality and synthesis in literature? Many authors today, at least those I have perused, seem to purvey the cliché that life is beautiful and short, so be happy and live each day to the fullest! Well, life isn’t always peachy; people aren’t always dealt a “fair” hand and it doesn’t always rectify itself in some contrived, karmic act of deux ex machina. And that’s okay to say – it’s okay to admit that, to explore the caverns of depression and loneliness, suffering and misanthropy, without re-emerging into the light. In fact, it’s not only enduring, as Fitzgerald proved; today it’d be rather refreshing.

(The photo is another wonderful visual from our favorite photographer Clara Natoli of Rome via morgueFile.)

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