The Great British Novel

[shemthepenman]

 t.s. eliot

He was British. He forsook us and became one of yours.

Or was that the point? That one of our so called good artists was actually yours?

yes, that was a joke. and people say americans struggle with irony.

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 t.s. eliot

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why do american writers hanker after writing The Great American Novel, at all? Why aspire for greatness? Is that a real question?

why don’t british writers or australian writers or french writers or german writers (serious german writers) or russian writers harbor similar desires? Don't they? You can't seriously know what's in everyone's mind.... Just because they don't SAY they do doesn't mean they don't.

but this is by the by, because i’m  assuming, regardless of aspirations and consciously demarcated goals, there surely are novels equivalent to The Great American Novel, for all of those other places. Word on the street is that Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written, The Brothers Karamazov coming in a close second. Just like the Olympics, the gold always goes to Russia.

Except this year, I guess.

yes, i think everyone is getting hung up on the “the great” part when the “american” part is the defining element of the phrase. the great american novel is something like a genre... a bit like “the oscar winning film”. there are loads of great american novels, of course. but The Great American Novel is supposed to express what it means to be american. i was just curious as to why this particularly patriotic genre isn’t something other nations seem to covet; as well as the question, which book novel etc expresses britishness (or whatever other nationalness) the best.

like i said, i think Marabou Stalk Nightmares captures a very particular britishness at a very particular time perfectly and unflinchingly.

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There is no quintessential Australian.  The bushman image of the 1800s is still lauded, but never truly existed except as a tool of Federation to distance us from the "lordly" English, much like the cowboy image that distracted the US from their nation's cowardly, predatory behaviour in both world wars.  

To my mind, the most Australian character ever was written by Andrew McGahan in his novel Praise (1992):

"It was three days after my twenty-third birthday. I'd just quit work at the drive-through bottle shop of the Capital Hotel. I'd been there three years, working twenty hours a week at serving the cars and stacking beer in the fridges. I had no fondness for serving cars or stacking beer, but even so it took an ugly dispute between the staff and the management to get me out. They didn't sack me, but they sacked everyone else, people who'd been there for years longer than me. I showed up for the evening shift and my name was the only one left on the roster. They wanted me to work the next four days straight, twelve hours a day, until they made up the numbers. I'd never worked four days straight in my life. If I'd been a man of strength I would've walked out there and then, left the customers waiting, the manager screaming. I wasn't a man of strength. I waited until the end of the shift. I closed up the shop. Then I resigned. Quietly. The manager asked me why. He asked me if it was something personal. There wasn't much I could say. I was tired. I felt it was time to wind that part of my life down. Work wasn't the answer to anything."

excellent. i haven’t read it. but definitely will. cheers.