Sounds amazing. I'll definitely want to read it.

It doesn't matter how clever the writer is; you can't bake a great soufflé if the ingredients are moody musings of Midwestern nostalgia. It's better to just aim for biscuits and gravy.
If the G.A.N. even has any meaning as something that could exist and be acknowledged as such, it won't come from pulp-merchants like Roth and Franzen who 'aspire to greatness' for its own sake, but from really good writers who try their hand at a novel.
From what I can tell the only thing that keeps American Pastoral and The Corrections on the shortlist at the expense of A Confederacy of Dunces, Invisible Man, and Huck Finn is that the authors of the latter three were interesting and fluent in English.

I'll wait for the film.

Haven't you read the Da Vinci Code?

Another baseball-themed novel -- but about so much more-- is a David Small's 1982 debut Almost Famous. Published by Norton originally, shortlisted for a National Book Award. Now in print through Universe Books It's a sadly neglected minor masterpiece and well worth re-discovering, or discovering, as the case may be.

Isn't it atavistic to laud a 'great american novel' and all that entails (freedom, nuclear families, sitcom moralities, rags and riches and good ol' hard work) when America is long past the stage of immigrant dreams and home-baked pies?

@ Ruaridh Nicol

Through the use of the author's frequently used alter ego, Nathan Zuckerberg

Oh dear oh dear! Did the editors of the Culture section get paid for this? None of them Roth readers? It is Nathan Zuckerman.

Surely you should have mentioned another fine book about baseball - Roth's The Great American Novel.

Nothing personal but that's about as nutty an opinion as I've ever read. Pulp merchants . . . hilarious.

Yeah - Wallace, Roth, Franzen and now Harbach.

Sorry, but more stories of growing up as an American white male are not 'the great American novel' to many people.

"We've been looking and looking for the next Great White Male novelist, and woohoo! We've found him."

It's the 21st century. Perhaps it's time the American literary establishment admitted it.

What about Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides? Borrowed and read and remembered by more people I know than the Corrections. Pulizter prizewinner; more than 3 million copies sold....Generations of a Greek American family in the mid-west.

It sounds terrible to me. Maybe it's the boring baseball bit. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's because American books with The N° 1 Best-seller emblazoned on the cover are for me the n° 1 reason not to read them.

Published in Britain on 19 January

No it isn't

OK, I'll amend that to 'pulp merchants who are however formidable prose writers by Northern California standards'. They're not New Age self-help writers, I must admit.

Jesus, this article couldn't be more White Male-dominated if it was a Tuesday night Rotary Club meeting in Harrogate.

Obviously it was so very great that it's very greatness escaped the attention of 'numerous agents'.

Publishing needs these 'next big thing' stories much more than people who like reading. What odds that Harbach disappears without trace?

I think the odds are high he will be a one book wonder. These days I no more believe the hype surrounding so-called serious literary authors than I do about the morass of obvious trash masquarading as commercial fiction.

And before anyone accuses me of being an elitist, I must tell you I am as happy to read Follett as I am Roth. Follett at least is literate, he is not brilliant or original. Roth on the other hand has an originality of imagination and style that transcends anything Follett can do.

But people read Follett for that cosy feeling of communal recognition. Making readers warm to stereotypes is a prerequisite of commercial fiction. That goes for the Millenium novels as much as it does for a host of commercial writers regularly trumpeted as searing, heart rending or even stomach churning.

I am currently forcing my way through a commercial author who has sold more than a millon books wondering when exactly the dull pedestrian prose and predictable plot will turn into the novel hyped as 'vast in scope'
exposing the 'power of greed' possessing a 'labyrinthine plot, unbearable tension, controversy and a social conscience' while making barbed comments on American foreign policy written by an author of consummate skill.

Or as one independent reviewer described it. A novel that wanders up one blind alley after another, has characters telling each other things each of them should already know and is a re-hash of the Church committee findings.

I wish this particular author good luck. He is clearly got his feet under the table when it comes to agents, publishers and reviewers in newspapers. But to a reader like myself publishing these days more and more resembles a vast sham by all those involved from author to reviewer to con money out of us poor suckers.

I suspect this latest hype is no different.

Something so depressing about the way we're in thrall to some idea of the great American novel. It taps into something far deeper which is the essentially grand-narrativistic way Americans largely perceive their lives- a self regarding notion of fairytales, overcoming all odds and reconciling ones meaningless subjective existence with some overrarching sense of meaning and unity. I am generalising a bit here but my experience of Americans and american films and novels (arguably interchangeable) since birth allows me to do so. Anyway, this American narrative is bankrupt and redundant in the modern day but we are still in awe of these preening writers like franzen (who wrote freedom in a darkened room with a blindfold on- see the immediate self mythologising at work). I remember similar hype about dave eggers, surely one of the worst most overegged writers of the last century, whos 'heartbreaking work of staggering genius' failed to conceal its self regarding intent behind weak irony of its title. Also a guy who wrote 'everything us illuminated' which was ok but because steeped in american narrative conventions was feted as an instant classic. Why aren't we as concerned with great European novelists on our doorstep who are largely neglected as we forever look across the Atlantic in awe of these apparently great writers none of whom should be spoken of alongside dickens.

The Great American Novel has already been written. There's two of them.

First, Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson. Two novels, but essentially one story told in two parts. Deeply American but also universal in its depiction of human love.

Second, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, a novel about the human community told from the point of view of a community outside society - the drunks and reprobates of 1950s Knoxville. Simultaneously hilarious and tragic.

The Corrections is good, but it tries so hard to be the Great American Novel it has to be disqualified.

American Pastoral isn't even Roth's best, let alone the Great American Novel. And David Foster Wallace? I confess to being mystified by his popularity. There's something manufactured about his style, the MFA-ification of creative writing.

"It's already booked its place on the dinner party bookshelves, among the Murakamis, the McEwans, the Zadie Smiths and the Rushdies. And why not? That's where most authors want and need to be."

ARSE!!!!!!

I actually read all of it, despite a growing sense that I'd read it before somewhere, and that it hadn't aged all that well (eventually it clicked: I discovered I was re-reading John Irving's The World According to Garp - a comic coming-of-age novel focusing on a set of exaggerated ['quirky'] character types, touching upon college sports, academia, sexuality, ageing and liberal/class guilt... I could go on...)

It's not a terrible book, it's just infuriatingly arch, cliched, middlebrow, and - sometimes this wouldn't be a complaint coming from me, but somehow it's inescapable here - plain uncool. I'm not surprised that the machinations behind the book are worthy of a(n) (e)book of their own - the whole thing felt like it had been pumped out of a publishing think-tank designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, which unfortunately doesn't include people who love literature. It does, however, seem to include people who like sports, two-dimensional characters (including a portrayal of homosexuality that strikes me as borderline homophobic it's so unrealistic), predictable plots, and symbolism with the subtlety of colonic irrigation.

The chief reason for my extreme dissatisfaction with the book was ultimately the fact that I came to it with such high hopes, so perhaps this review is a little unfair. With so much hype given to it as a great American novel, I was hoping for something completely different to the Murakamis, the McEwans, the Zadie Smiths and the Rushdies. I don't want watered down versions of what came before, although I'll admit sometimes I do read for comfort rather than the inimicable pleasure of discovery. I think it's telling that the above-quoted list omits the Coetzees, the Bolanos, the Dyers, Kingsolvers... Even Roth's still going strong, and needs only a fraction of the word-count to create more original and compelling stories.

I am currently writing a book that draws on my own experiences of trying to pursue "the great Scottish dream" and the many and varied experiences I had along the way. I am not having much luck with publishers either, this artcle has given me hope that maybe one day my work will be noticed

Chapter One
Tam put down his bottle of buckfast and fished a twopence piece out of his pocket with which he rubbed furiously at the silver panel of the scratchcard he had just found outside the chip shop where he always bought his deep fried fruit pastilles. On this nightt however he was to be unlucky, the card failed to deliver it's promise of a £100,000 jackpot, in fact it failed to deliver even a free go.

"Gamblings for fuckin eejits" mused Tam, as he picked up his bottle and went into the chippy................

What do you all think?

Given I've already bought this book (it's excellent) and it's available to buy on Amazon, I'd say your publication dates in the article are wrong.

Just out of curiosity, have you read it? Or are you just assuming this from one article?

ArdentReader
7 January 2012 09:11PM
Another baseball-themed novel -- but about so much more-- is a David Small's 1982 debut Almost Famous. Published by Norton originally, shortlisted for a National Book Award. Now in print through Universe Books It's a sadly neglected minor masterpiece and well worth re-discovering, or discovering, as the case may be.

Thus proving you can't judge a book by its cover but you can judge it based on stereotypes, and bias. Typical.

I live near the shore of Lake Michigan, and have visited the many surrounding colleges and universities. To see a statue of Herman Melville would be as shocking a thing as seeing a statue of Mao. Moby Dick in or around Lake Michigan and its streams? It ain't natural. More likely the statues around the colleges and universities would be of hero American football legends (thinking Notre Dame here), along with a token piece to either Lincoln, Washington or Jesus.

Not that I'm suspect of Harvard grads who write books, but the hype is usually for commercial reasons only. It rarely lives up to the prepub as a "great novel". Witness another Harvard grad who had such important things to say about his life that he wrote two autobiographies -- Barrack Obama.

I can vouch that nobody is carrying this book around in their arms whilst riding the subway or "El" in Chicago or in any of the other cities I visit that "hug the shore of Lake Michigan".

Why? Because so-called "serious literature" is so narrow in its focus and scope, tells tales that are small and easily forgotten, and that involve small passions, that the wide range of the population cannot identify with its author or the author's characters.

A novel about perfection with baseball as a metaphor? All I know is that in the capital of the Midwest, Chicago, we have two consistently losing professional teams, the Cubs and the White Sox. Hardly a field of dreams for anybody. A metaphor, yes, of some of the failings of the people and the governments of the Midwest.

You know me, Al, when I say this: baseball is not the national pastime. Hasn't been for years. Competitive eating seems to have taken over as the national pastime, based on the girth of many I see.

Well, good luck to Harbach and his book. I guess it's been a year out here and nobody is listening to the literary critics, but they might it the critics and publisher sprung for a dinner at the "all you can eat buffet.

Meanwhile, I'll be on the watch for the great white whale in Lake Michigan -- and the so-called Great American (literary) Novel.

I'm liking Chapter One here RefUndEd.
Nice opening, intriguing plot, and you bring it all back around -- literally.

A "home run", as we say.

Hope to see Chapter Two soon.
(Please let it not be about baseball and
have Herman Melville in it).

Ah, the Great American Novel, where Great stands for: did nobody think to edit this?

@ RefUndEd: Go for it, sure-fire prize winning material, though the contraction of gambling and is requires an apostophe whatever the accent.

^ apostrophe

A thousand recommendations to your post!! Exactly my thoughts on the matter, although elucidated far better than i could do. It's sad the way we are in thrall of American culture (in terms of literature, TV and film), it seems the Guardian has an article every month referencing 'The Great American Novel.'

I find it deliciously ironic that the Grauniad chose a picture of a weekend game of softball to evoke the spirit of a novel seemingly based on the intricacies of baseball. From what I have read, the book seems to be a ham-handed attempt to write a satire of the quest for the "Great American Novel." A statue of Melville in Wisconsin is as egregiously out of place as is any serious baseball being played at a small midwestern college (or even Harvard, for that matter). It seems to be the product of a quest to understand the concept of a quest rather than anything of substnace. If the book has any interest or redeeming value it is probably as an homage to Roth's previous satire on the genre, all the way down to the sophomorically Dickensian neologistic names of the leading characters. As is probably obvious, I haven't read the book yet. I probably never will.

as long as its not insipid 'consumerland' tosh a la franzen and delillo i might give it a look.

I think David Foster Wallace said it best:

I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

The comments on this piece are so full of European political correctness and Brit jealousy of the U.S. it's nauseating. who cares where the author is from?

Few things are more parochial than the Great American Novel.

In 1948, the great American literary critic Leslie Fiedler published a controversial piece in the Partisan Review about what he saw as a recurrent theme in American literature -- the unspoken or implied homoerotic relationship between males of different races, using as examples Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, and McMurphy and Chief Bromden. Fieldler called it "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!"

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_03/posnock.html

Harbach's novel might have been better as a satire called "The Art of Fiedler" and instead of the baseball manual, Henry, Owen & Guert could have lived by the precepts contained in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!"

Wasn't Zadie Smith's NYRB review of two novels: Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and Remainder by Tom McCarthy? I think she wrote that Remainder represented a possible new direction for the novel while Netherland is more the familiar type of "lyrical realism" that you find in Cat's Table, for instance.

Cat's Table could be exactly what Kenyan author Mr. Wainaina had in mind when he referred to the "codes" of certain English-language writing:

"I can read it because I am familiarised," he continued. "But as a writer I recognise it is still indigestible, and there are Kenyans – who are English-speaking Kenyans, educated Kenyans – who will not and cannot get the codes."

The Art of Fielding falls solidly in the category of lyrical realism. It's well-written but I found it disappointing after reading The Great American Novel, Philip Roths's 1973 satire of WWII baseball, red-baiting and hyper-patriotism. In the aftermath of the steroids scandals, Roth's novel defies all the smugness about baseball ever having any "integrity."

The only problem I had with Roth's novel is that it took me about a month to track down the specific history that was being satirised. That's something that no reviewers seem aware of. This book helped:

http://www.amazon.com/Boys-Who-Were-Left-Behind/dp/0803224281

My other criticism of Harbach's novel is that the alternative "straight" love story seems like a rip-off of Bull Durham, with catcher Mike Schwartz as a stand-in the Kevin Costner character "Crash" Davis (assigned to show the rookie the ropes even though his careers is set to expire at the end of the season), Henry Skrimshander as the Tim Robbins character "Meat" (both of whom were afflicted with wild throwing problems) and Pella Affenlight as the Susan Sarandon character who leaves "Crash" for "Meat."

The Great American Novel is The Tower Treasure (1927) by Franklin W. Dixon. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, the rest, are pretenders to the throne.

No, I haven't read it yet. My point is really about the hype not the book itself.
The book trade is today no different to Hollywood in the way it manufactures reader interest and sales. Just as Hollywood fabricates stories about the story so publishers and agents do the same with books. They have to do it. There is no other way of selling the product if you want to stay in business let alone make a living.
Ed Victor once said if a book does not sell thousands within six weeks of publication, then it is a failure. So work your way back from that statement to the first step you have to take to ensure your book does bust the block. And you arrive at the hype of this novel.
It is quite clear to anyone that neither agents, publishers nor the editors who work for them are themselves literate. All they know is how to make money. And I suppose any author will admit that they would be happy with that.
For example look how hard they slaved to keep sport off the cover of this book, when it is about sport. they knew that wouldn't sell.
I think few people in publishing are interested in good writing these days. Pick any bestseller currently on the lists and you will find a host of grammatical erros, bad spelling, tortuous syntax and staggering narrow vocabulary.

must read it before hollywood makes a happy ending

It's ironic that you dismiss novels and their dissemination as akin to the Hollywood studio system, yet you haven't read the novel. The literary merit of the novel itself will far outlast any of the hype you're so critical of. But that's just my opinion. How do you know the book isn't worthy of the hype? Your argument is more centered around a pessimistic world view of the publishing industry and not the standalone achievement of the novel. It seems a tad like shooting yourself in the foot to equate this novel to your pessimistic world view when you haven't read the novel itself.

And funnily enough, the novel is about sport, but also about so much more. It's about youth, it's about the once in a lifetime life that is college, it's about friendship, companionship and belief in others. Fundamentally, it's about the unique experience of college. So from that, I'd say the cover art is quite fitting. Also, the paperback edition of the novel very clearly uses the mise-en-scene of sport so that argument is slightly redundant. What I fail to understand is your thought that publishers manufacture reading habits. I think that's b*llocks. Anyone with half a brain will read what appeals to them, not what is marketed en masse by a faceless corporation.

I agree with your final point around grammatical errors (or erros as you spelt it), bad spelling (!), tortuous syntax and staggering(ly) narrow vocabulary. Too many modern authors are afraid of being wordy and over-elaborate. But often it's not needed. Especially in a novel about baseball.

why do we never read articles about the great english/scottish/irish/spanish/german etc novel??????????????

Isn't it atavistic to laud a 'great american novel' and all that entails (freedom, nuclear families, sitcom moralities, rags and riches and good ol' hard work) when America is long past the stage of immigrant dreams and home-baked pies?

...and morphed into something even more sinister?

I take your point that the book might be worthy of the hype. Though my point is that when everything is hyped in the book trade it is impossible to tell what is good.

However I disagree with this - What I fail to understand is your thought that publishers manufacture reading habits. I think that's b*llocks. Anyone with half a brain will read what appeals to them, not what is marketed en masse by a faceless corporation.

The appeal is based on the hype so publishers do create a bandwagon. Once you buy the book who cares whether you like it (apart from the author). I also think publishers and agents rightly argue - terrible as it may seem - that as most people are only basically literate, most want the kind of novel you describe 'friendship, companionship and belief in others then where's the point in publishing anything other than the kind of commercial fiction you see on the shelves.
And, yes, I suffer too much from the dodgy digit syndrome when typing!

As soon as I read that character name, Scrimshander, I thought: Oop, Scrimshaw... history written on whalebone... this is going to be a self-consciously post modern meta novel inspired by Moby Dick and then, lo and behold, the statue of Melville pop up. Also, Westish, not entirely West, so I guess we'll get some cod Zen philosophy as well. Could be good; could be awful.

Sounds boring.

I loved that Donna Tart debut though. Cracking read.

"I The Jury": Great American Novel, like it or not.

There has been no American Literature in the traditional sense since the 1940's, if then.

I've uncovered a glaring hole in this discussion; with the non-stop mentioning of Franzen and Wallace and other trendy voices of modern American literature, not one person has mentioned Thomas Pynchon! Perhaps it's just me, but surely not, surely somebody here agrees? It just seems somewhat undeniable once you finish any of his early novels. Crying of lot 49 is certainly a great novel, certainly American, and it barely covers 100 pages. Miraculous author. Deserves a mention amongst these peers. A strong mention.

The McEwan stable of British Novel is the equivalent perhaps?

@Unteabagable

You're dead right there matey - Gravity's Rainbow gets the accolade from me.
Donna Tartt in second place.

You're right about Henry's last name, "Skrimshander" being an alternate term for scrimshaw (art etched on the bones of sperm whales), however, all the Moby-Dick pretensions in this novel (like the character named "Starblind" after "Starbuck," the first mate aboard the Pequod, and another named Bulkington, a mysterious crew man who makes only one appearance in Moby-Dick) are either completely superficial or serve only to further the joke about homoeroticism.

One of the major flaws of Moby-Dick is that it's all male. I count only two females in the book: Hosea Hussey, the waitress at the Nantucket chowder restaurant with the punny name "Try Pots," who engages in some funny back-and-forth blue collar banter with Ishmael and Queequeg, and then the wife of the ship's Quaker manager (I think he is), who leaves the Pequod with her husband before it sets sail. That doesn't mean that Pella, the daughter of the college president who gets a job at the school cafeteria, has any relation to Hosea Hussey, nor that Owen's mother, the African American TV news presenter from San Jose is any relation to Richard Nixon.

Race is the factor in both novels that Ruaridh Nicoll decided to spare his sensitive readers. Owen Dunne, the gay student at Westish College, is supposed to be black. While I find Owen completely believable as a gay man, he's the least convincing African American character I've ever encountered in fiction. He's on the baseball team, but the manager allows him to read in the dugout during games. It fact, when he's hit in face and nearly killed, he's reading Kierkegaard.

Owen, as a recipient of the Maria Westish scholarship, is the only student in his class who's allowed to live alone in the dormitory. Then when the whiz kid shortstop enrolls, the president of the college offers Owen a new computer and a liberal book allowance to share his room.

The Pequod crew was intentionally multiracial because: a) that was Melville's experience aboard whaling ships, and b) the novel was in some ways a statement about the Fugitive Slave Laws. The African Americans on the crew include the cook and the cabin boy and the harpooners include an African, a South Sea Islander, and a Native American, but the greater crew was even more diverse, for example, Ahab's personal harpooners were "Parsees" (probably Zoroastrians from Persia).

What Caryl Phillips says about racial identity in British fiction in his essay "England, Half English" from his collection Colour Me English, applies equally to this novel:

It is, of course, possible. . . that white British writers have avoided writing about race in the hope that the problem (in other words, the black people), might just go away. It is equally possible, given the evidence of the work of those writers who have written about race, that it is difficult for white British writers to engage with black characters without rummaging through the baggage of their sexual identity. . . if, when sitting at their desks, white writers can see black people as little more than players with trousers down entering the bedroom, or pants up sprinting for the door, then it is better that they should stay silent. I, for one, am quite happy to read Amis's Lucky Jim or Braine's Room at the Top without having a poorly imagined black Lothario merely making up the numbers. . .