The Good Stuff

The Great American Novel and God Only Knows

The Great American Novel

The Great Gatsby was the most recent selection for the Gentlemen’s Literary Society that Jack, Chris Russo and I participate in (and which Jack wrote about last week). Over the many years since I’d last read Gatsby, I’ve seen several writers opine that it is the Great American Novel. It’s excellent – beautifully written and well-crafted in every way – but I don’t think it rises to that level. It’s a well-captured vignette as opposed to the panorama necessary to express the breadth of the American experience. I have the same objection to casting Huckleberry Finn in that role.

My candidate for the Great American Novel is John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – The 42^nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money. Dos Passos’ canvas covers a wide range of American experience in the first third of the 20^th century, exploring themes and tensions that continue to shape our country – capitalism and labor, urban and rural, war and peace, justice and power. Dos Passos creates an experimental newsreel montage in the first volume that brings in many different voices – one of the ways that he broadens the novel’s range.

Dos Passos began as an idealistic socialist, and the early sections of the book reflect this perspective on economic and social justice. In later years he became increasingly conservative; his eyes were opened by an extended visit to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. But he is a gifted novelist, not a propagandist; he enables you to see what he sees.

To argue that U.S.A. might be the Great American Novel is not to say that it is the greatest American novel (though I rank it very high). That’s a topic for another post.

- Jack Jr.

God Only Knows

I don’t know where I first heard The Beach Boys. I assume it was my parents playing their albums at home or in the car, but songs like Good Vibrations, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Help Me Rhonda, I Get Around, Surfin’ USA and others, feel like an indispensable part of my childhood. Like books or movies, when it comes to music there is a difference between what I enjoy and what I appreciate. There’s music I recognize is excellent, even if it isn’t to my particular taste. But over the years I’ve found myself coming back to The Beach Boys periodically and those “enjoyment” and “appreciation” categories overlap more and more.

God Only Knows is my favorite song of theirs and it isn’t even close. Brian Wilson passed away on Wednesday and I’ve seen people share that song more than any other as they remember his work with The Beach Boys. It’s remarkable in a lot of ways and always worth stopping to listen to.

- Jack III