Textual Practice

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Making it long: men, women, and the great

American novel now

Kasia Boddy

To cite this article: Kasia Boddy (2019) Making it long: men, women, and the great American
novel now, Textual Practice, 33:2, 318-337, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509268

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE
2019, VOL. 33, NO. 2, 318–337
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509268

Making it long: men, women, and the great American

novel now
Kasia Boddy
Faculty of English, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT
In 2010, following the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom, a
furore briefly emerged in the literary media about whether the Great American
Novel, so-called since 1868, is ‘coded male’. This essay briefly explores the
history of novelistic claims to national spokesmanship, and, latterly,
spokeswomanship. It considers the influence on Don DeLillo on contemporary
fiction, and particularly, his importance for women writers such as Jennifer
Egan, Dana Spiotta, Rachel Kushner and A.M. Homes. The bulk of the essay
offers a reading of Homes’s 2013 novel May We Be Forgiven, which
simultaneously critiques the macho posturings of the GAN and asserts its
place within that tradition.

KEYWORDS Great American Novel; domestic fiction; family; A.M. Homes; May We Be Forgiven; post-
utopianism; Richard Nixon; Don DeLillo; Jonathan Franzen; Jennifer Egan; Dana Spiotta: Rachel Kushner

He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long.

He entertained the men, why not?1
‘There comes a time in the mid-life of every male American writer when he
feels compelled to make his big statement about the state of the union.’2
Thus the conventional wisdom goes. This particular formulation is by Tim
Adams, reviewing Ethan Canin’s America America in 2008. Adams argues
that by choosing such a ‘hubristic’ title for his ‘fat’ novel Canin was announ-
cing a ‘self-conscious’ connection to the long-standing tradition of the Great
American Novel (GAN). It was a move that demonstrated ‘undeniable guts’,
Adams suggests, for it invited reviewers like him to measure the novel against
the canon of ‘big ones’; and some of those reviewers inevitably concluded that
it didn’t ‘quite earn its grand double-barrelled title’.3 That verdict – not quite a
GAN but ‘a Very Good American Novel’ – was, of course, also conventional.4
Since its initial formulation in the 1860s, the GAN idea has always been more
about inspiration than achievement; the very fact that it has been attempted
but remains ‘unwritten’ providing a spur to future engagement with both
nation and national literature.5 The partial failure of a novel like America

CONTACT Kasia Boddy [email protected]

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 319

America was therefore nothing to be ashamed of, but rather a testimony to its
author’s effort, ambition, and assumption of authority. It is those qualities,
pointed out Katha Pollitt, that are usually ‘coded male’ and that glean
rewards, both financial and in the ‘economy of prestige’.6
Pollitt was contributing to the ‘Franzenfreude’ debate that briefly domi-
nated the literary press in 2010 after the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s
fourth novel, Freedom. The widespread press coverage given to Freedom
spurred two other bestselling novelists, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, to
comment on the paucity of book reviews, particularly in the New York
Times, afforded to fiction by women and to commercial fiction (the two cat-
egories were often conflated).7 The ‘fracas’ had wide ramifications, drawing
attention to data on gender disparity in the US literary press.8 But Weiner
also made another, rather different, point: ‘when a man writes about family
and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers
the same topics, it’s romance or a beach book’.9 ‘Novels about suburban
families,’ echoed Pankaj Mishra, ‘are more likely to be greeted as microcosmic
explorations of the human condition if they are by male writers; their female
counterparts are rarely allowed to transcend the category of domestic
fiction.’10 When Franzen’s The Corrections appeared in 2001 the New York
Times entitled its review ‘A Family Portrait as Metaphor for the ‘90s’.11
By focusing on ‘topics’, however, Weiner ignores the conscious signalling
that works like Freedom do to indicate capital L, or capital GAN, status.
The most obvious paratextual ‘password’ comes in the form of a title such
as America America or American Pastoral or, more circumspectly or emble-
matically, Independence Day or Freedom.12 Would Franzen really have been
showcased on the cover of Time magazine as ‘Great American Novelist’ if
he’d entitled his 550-page ‘bromance’ of Walter and Richard Not Best
Friends Forever?13 Although he initially disavowed the GAN tag – ‘I always
hated the expression’ – he then qualified that dissociation: ‘mostly because I
encountered it in stupid or sneering contexts.’14 Franzen knew exactly what
he was doing.
Titles are not the only means by which novelists seek to ‘transcend the cat-
egory of domestic fiction’. Carefully chosen allusions also allow an author to
choose ‘his [or her] peers and thus his [or her] place in the pantheon.’15 After
dissecting the recent plethora of books with titles of ‘faintly nationalistic sim-
plicity’ – ‘American anything, really’ – Chad Harbach modestly called his own
first novel, The Art of Fielding.16 But Harbach had other means to signal his
ambition. As a ‘topic’, baseball offered an easily recognisable ‘American’ link
to Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), as well as to Philip Roth’s The Great
American Novel (1973). Moreover, like Freedom itself, The Art of Fielding
makes much of its allusions to the masterpieces of the ‘American Renais-
sance’. Reviewers dutifully acknowledged, and praised, its ‘echoes of the nine-
teenth-century greats’ and concluded that they ‘lend’ the novel an ‘unexpected
320 K. BODDY

richness’ which raises it ‘high in the standings’.17 While Harbach went to con-
siderable lengths to avoid using the phrase ‘Great American Novel’, preferring
to talk in institutional terms of the ‘New York “canon”’, journalists reviewing,
or interviewing, him were less coy.18

Moi Aussi, Perhaps

‘A whale-ship was my Yale college and my Harvard’, says Ishmael at one point
in Moby-Dick, but Harbach’s Harvard actually was Harvard.19 The same
college introduced the same novel to Norman Mailer half a century earlier,
albeit through a different critical lens. Both writers rework Melville’s story
of men together, ‘federated along one keel’, but while The Naked and the
Dead (1948) interprets this in the light of F. O. Matthiessen’s emphasis on
‘the defects of individualism’, The Art of Fielding looks to early-1990s queer
theory.20 Allusion is always critically filtered, even if its purpose seems to
remain largely the same. Convinced that ‘everyone would know’ his ‘biggest
influence’, Mailer, like Harbach, wanted educated readers to recognise his
own education.21
But Mailer was also signalling something that Harbach, in 2012, didn’t
really have to worry about: what might be called his right to allusion.
Lynne Tillman recently described the ‘gan’ [sic] that emerged after the
Second World War as a ‘cultural product of America’s new role as a dominant
world power’, akin to Abstract Expressionism in its relentless masculine self-
assertion.22 While there is something to be said for this, Tillman’s argument
fails to acknowledge that at the time writers such as Mailer and Saul Bellow
and, one she doesn’t mention, Ralph Ellison, were hardly self-evident spokes-
men for all-American masculinity. Rather, each assumed that role precisely to
avoid an expected ‘minority tone’.23 In the early 1950s, Ellison and Bellow
each published a Bildungsroman in which a young man, seemingly on the per-
iphery of America, becomes its spokesman. When Bellow’s The Adventures of
Augie March (1953) came out, reviewers compared him to John Dos Passos
and Thomas Wolfe, although one complained that he was ‘aiming too early
and too directly at the Great American Novel’.24 Bellow was certainly forth-
right about his intention. ‘I am an American,’ announces his protagonist
(initials AM) in the novel’s opening line, and its final word is ‘America’.25
The opening of Ellison’s Invisible Man, published a year earlier, would
seem to undercut this stance: ‘I am an invisible man,’ the protagonist declares.
But when, after telling a tale that allegorises black history by riffing on Twain
and Melville, the novel concludes with the challenge, ‘Who knows but that, on
the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’, it transpires that he also means ‘I am
an American’.26 ‘Whatever my role as “race man”,’ Ellison liked to say, ‘I am
as a writer … a custodian of the American language’.27 Bellow was Jewish,
from Chicago; Ellison was black, living in New York: each keen to assert
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 321

directly, and through his allusions, that he spoke not simply as a Jewish writer
or a black writer or a New York writer or a Chicago writer. The strategy
worked. In 1953 Invisible Man won the National Book Award, and 1954
the prize went to The Adventures of Augie March.
Since then, allusion’s signal of ‘cultural entitlement’ has seldom faltered in
what Jonathan Freedman dubs the ‘assimilation-by-culture’ project.28
Women writers, of whatever race or ethnicity, have, as we have seen, faced
an additional problem – the almost axiomatic understanding of the GAN
as a particularly male enterprise. This was largely a twentieth-century inven-
tion. In its original formulation, argues Lawrence Buell, ‘the GAN idea was
seldom explicitly framed as a gendered concept’; indeed, it was widely
accepted that the ‘nearest approach to the desired phenomenon’ was
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52).29 After the Civil
War, however, as the United States embraced ‘bigness and greatness in all
their forms’ – imperial expansionism, corporate consolidation, aesthetic
style – a connection was increasingly made between size and masculinity.30
Increasingly, then, novels claimed national significance by dint of the
amount of logistical work they did – their assiduousness in collecting, organ-
ising and then representing data in the name of ‘complete and whole articu-
lation’.31 It was in this particular context that Gertrude Stein temporarily
abandoned a long novel called The Making of Americans, writing to a friend,
I am afraid that I can never write the Great American novel. I dn’t [sic] know
how to sell on a margin or to do anything with shorts and longs, so I have to
content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population
generally.32

The suggestion here is that these groups somehow belong to the short story, to
local colour, rather than to the national epic, and that Stein, as a woman, a
Jew, and a lesbian, also belonged to the modest margins of representation.
But Stein, perhaps because she considered herself a ‘masculine type’, soon
regained her confidence. In the notebooks for The Making of Americans,
she wrote of Picasso, Matisse, and the ‘maleness that belongs to genius’,
adding ‘moi aussi, perhaps’.33 What better way to demonstrate that affinity
than by writing a 925-page novel? It’s true that The Making of Americans
offers a ‘satirical view’ of the GAN, but its ‘antidote to patriarchy’, its ‘patri-
cide’, is nonetheless enacted in masculine terms.34 When Stein said that
George Washington ‘began a novel, the novel the great American novel’,
she was identifying the first president as ‘a crucial prototype of her own orig-
inal American genius’.35
The evolution of modernism into postmodernism did little to shift the
gender, and ethnic, identity of the Great American ‘novelist-as-giant’; in the
familiar narrative of Pynchon begetting DeLillo begetting Wallace, masculi-
nity has remained ‘constitutive of the genre’.36 Since the emergence of
322 K. BODDY

second-wave feminism in the 1970s, however, the giants have become rather
self-conscious about their big books, worried that by playing the ‘GREAT
AMERICAN GAME’ they might simply be indulging in a rarefied form of
adolescent ‘showing off’.37 At first, men published confessions about their
youthful GAN delusions, about how they fooled themselves that ‘Thoreau-
Emerson’ could be used expose the ‘crucial facts of the age’ (things like ‘Amer-
icans are lonely’; ‘Americans are greedy’; ‘the Bomb is bad’) until conscious-
ness-raising revealed that, rather than performing a ‘patriotic duty’, all that
they had ‘really wanted’ was ‘literary stallionship.’38 The next generation,
the ‘post-boomers’ born or raised in the 1960s and 1970s, were even more
anxiously ambivalent about their desire to present ‘the American Century
as Seen Through a Brick’ of a novel.39 Updike, Mailer, and Roth (‘the Great
Male Narcissists who’ve dominated post-war realist fiction’) became whipping
boys for many male writers. They found it more difficult, however, to shake off
the ‘dangerously attractive’ ‘boy-novel phallicism’ of Gaddis and Pynchon.40
But, despite all the embarrassment, there has been no shortage in the
twenty-first century of male-authored long novels filled with canonical allu-
sions and titles that hint at state-of-the-nation reflections. Business as usual
in the ‘genre of “genius”’ then, except perhaps for the inclusion of a humor-
ous, and self-inoculating, line or two about a writer-character’s ‘searing ambi-
tion to write the Great American Novel’ and eventual realisation that he was
doing it for ‘all the wrong reasons’, such as a desire to feature on ‘the cover of
Time’.41 Appearances to the contrary, these novels insist, the author himself is
not a misogynist and indeed is well aware of the masculine posturing usually
involved in the ‘big book’ – a work whose ‘thickness’ and ‘length’ will translate
into ‘muscularity and febrility’, as well as, of course, hard cash.42 ‘Literature
could turn you into an asshole’, but not if you took sufficient care with
your ‘arrogance problem’.43
The position of post-boomer women writers is rather different from both
that of their male peers, and that of the generation of women writers born in
the 1930s and 1940s, writers such as Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson,
Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lynne Tillman, who freely used American
history and ‘classic American literature’, reimagined ‘from a female perspec-
tive’, in order to diagnose the ‘national disease’ but who shied away from the
GAN cliché.44 If the narrator of Tillman’s Motion Sickness (1991), for
example, wonders if her friend might ‘secretly … be hard at work on the
Great American Novel’, she quickly corrects herself, since ‘no woman I’ve
ever known has used that phrase, one that’s ridiculous to me.’45 ‘I don’t
think that way at all,’ insists Joyce Carol Oates; ‘I don’t have any friends
who think that way.’46 For both, the ‘gendered’ nature of the Great American
Novel is ‘constitutive of the genre’: ‘this means a woman could write it, but
then it wouldn’t be the gan’.47
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 323

The next generation of women writers have been more equivocal. On

winning the British Costa Prize in 2013 for May We Be Forgiven, A.M.
Homes was asked if she thought she had written a GAN. She said that she
did, although, she insisted, the word ‘great’ should not be understood as a
term of ‘critical judgment’ nor, it seemed, to express quantity; rather she
was thinking of ‘great as in expansive, and far reaching, and so in that
sense, absolutely, very much, I think of myself, in positive and negative
ways, as a very American writer.’48 There is perhaps something a little disin-
genuous in Homes’s gloss here, especially since she’d just won a prize for her
longest book to date. Did the judges think it ‘great’ in the first sense because it
was ‘great’ in the second? Did she win the ‘women’s prize for fiction’ despite,
or because, the novel was narrated by a man and was, in Homes’s own phrase,
a ‘guy book’?49
Once more allusion is a vital component in the mix. May We Be Forgiven is
filled with authorial name-checks and references. Moby-Dick gets a passing
mention, but Homes’s focus is squarely on those post-war American novels
that, as Tillman argued, were ‘part of the cultural ascendancy of America
after the war’.50 Homes identified, as particular ‘literary mentors’, Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Something Happened (1974), and John Cheever’s
Falconer (1977).51 Both were writers who had considered the GAN – Heller
had been happy to accept, ‘in modest deference to many people who hold
that view’, that Catch-22 was ‘a’ if not ‘THE’ Great American Novel, while
Cheever’s appearance on the cover of Newsweek, to celebrate the publication
of ‘A Great American Novel’ was in many ways the culmination of a life wor-
rying about his place ‘in the big league’.52 But while Cheever’s ghost makes a
brief appearance in ‘an old tan corduroy jacket’, the biggest walk-on part in
May We Be Forgiven is given to Don DeLillo; like Cheever, and the novel’s
protagonists, he is a resident of Westchester, Connecticut.53 DeLillo is first
spotted buying tea and lemon pound cake in Starbucks, and the narrator
initially thinks he looks like ‘a cross between a guy who might change your
flat and Clint Eastwood’. A little later, he shows up at a hardware store to
buy ‘duct tape and dust masks and a flashlight’. The salesman wonders if
he ‘putting together [his] disaster kit’, but it’s just ‘spring cleaning’. When
he appears a third time, in the mall, ‘coming out of one of the stores’, the nar-
rator thinks it’s a conspiracy, but DeLillo protests. ‘I live here,’ he says.54
While Cheever and Heller are rarely discussed by contemporary novelists,
Homes is far from alone in paying homage to DeLillo and the ‘paranoid Sev-
enties’ novel.55 ‘No writer of his era,’ it is often asserted, ‘has had anything
close to his influence on American fiction.’56 What’s more surprising,
perhaps, given the ‘crammed maleness’ of his writing, is how many of his
‘heirs’ are women.57 Dana Spiotta’s first novel, Lightning Field (2001) featured
a DeLillo blurb on its jacket, while Christian Lorenz described her second, Eat
the Document (2006), along with Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013)
324 K. BODDY

and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001) and Welcome to the Goon Squad
(2010), as written ‘under the spell of Underworld’.58 All three writers have
appeared on stage with DeLillo and eagerly acknowledge his importance for
their own development. Kushner says he is her ‘favourite living author’ and
that he taught her to be ‘worldly’.59 Egan praises his ‘ambition’ in showing
how ‘the pressure within ordinary humans collide with the pressures of poli-
tics and history’.60 This echoes DeLillo’s own formulation of his legacy as
‘taking the novel out of the realm of the domestic and into that of
history’.61 There are, of course, many forms that the political or historical
novel can take. What DeLillo offered both male and female writers, I would
suggest, was a way of using ‘ordinary humans’ and history allegorically in
novels of ‘big ideas’ about ‘American consciousness’.62 Like Ellison, Bellow
and the others, DeLillo had written his way ‘out of a certain narrowness’
and into ‘the broader culture’ by doing just this: ‘Americana – the title itself
says something’, he admitted of his first novel.63 When an interviewer
asked whether he was a post-modern writer, he replied that he’d ‘prefer not
to be labelled. I’m a novelist, period. An American novelist’.64 DeLillo made
it acceptable for twenty-first century women writers to identify themselves
in the same way.65

‘A Very American Writer’

May We Be Forgiven, A.M. Homes’s sixth novel, pulls together different
strands of her earlier work: the black suburban humour of The Safety of
Objects (1990) and Music for Torching (1999); the exposure of sexual abuse
that first appeared in The End of Alice (1996); and the middle-aged-reinven-
tion fable of This Book Will Save Your Life (2006). Homes has consistently
described the concerns of these books as ‘very American’.66 In May We Be
Forgiven, she underlines that point with references to Richard Nixon as
well as Don DeLillo.
On one level, these are easily ignored. This is a fast-paced cultural
comedy of vacations, hospital visits and trips to the mall; it involves Goo-
gling, sexting and cats having kittens; bugs are killed, dogs walked and, in
an explicit nod to DeLillo’s Underworld, the ‘magical’ qualities of multi-
coloured Jell-O are celebrated.67 The TV is always on, prompting the narra-
tor to reflect on how ‘television binds us as Americans – we are what we
watch’, and to ask such questions as ‘is it still “real” if it’s not documented
and delivered back to us in the media?’68 This sense of ‘myth being born
right there in our living room’ is familiar from White Noise (1984), but
DeLillo’s novel also seems to have taught Homes that, in fiction as well as
on screen, ‘an occasional catastrophe’ helps to ‘break up the incessant bom-
bardment of information’ and ‘the other-worldly babble of the American
family’.69
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 325

The novel begins with two brothers, George and Harold Silver, living very
different lives.70 George is a TV executive, with a wife, Jane, two children, Nate
and Ashley, a cat, a dog, and a house in the Connecticut suburbs; Harold is an
academic historian who lives a semi-detached Manhattan life with his wife
Claire. Within forty pages everything changes. George has a car accident,
killing a Hispanic couple and orphaning their son, Ricardo; shortly after-
wards, on finding Jane in bed with Harold, he clocks her with the bedside
lamp; Jane dies, George is incarcerated, and Harold, divorced by Claire,
moves to the suburbs to look after the kids. After this, the plot doesn’t slow
down – for example, Ashley is sexually abused by her teacher; George gets
involved with an Israeli arms dealer; and Harold is briefly abducted by
some children, then shadowed by a seventies-style conspiracy theorist – but
the novel becomes more interested in pursuing the ‘possibility of repair’.71
Although he laments his ‘despicable descent into adultery and murderous
familial fellowship’, Harold’s occasional reports of an ‘overwhelming sense
of dread’ feel more gestural than real.72
Homes says she was attracted to the works of Heller and Cheever because
of their balance of seriousness and comedy, darkness and light.73 But May We
Be Forgiven has little of the profound existential angst that lies behind the
jokes in a novel like Something Happened. ‘Is this all there is for me to do?’
asks Heller’s protagonist, Bill Slocum, ‘Is this really the most I can get from
the few years left in this one life of mine? And the answer I get, of course,
is always … Yes!’74 May We Be Forgiven, however, is a book about ‘second
chances’. We never think that the children’s lives have been ‘ruined’; on the
contrary, we watch their gradual transformation, under Harold’s care, from
‘lumps’ who sit at the table with ‘eyes focused on their small screens’ into
responsible young citizens. For Heller, the consequences of parenthood are
tragically absurd; for Homes, adoptive parenting provokes a ‘better version’
of Harold.75 A lot rests on structure. Although the novel has no chapters,
perhaps to suggest Harold’s sense of ‘free fall’, we never really doubt his
ability to ‘get a grip on the runaway world’.76 Moreover, both Harold and
the novel find order in the rituals of Jewish mourning, coming of age – his
nephew’s Bar Mitzvah, but also his niece’s first menstruation – and, as the
title suggests, atonement. If these signal that this is Homes’s ‘Jewish book’,
we should not forget that the novel begins and ends at Thanksgiving, one
of the annual civic rituals that connect family to national life.77 The year
has been lurid but rarely dull.
Harold also approaches his job as a historian through the structures of
ritual and atonement. Although his students believe that their attention
should be ‘perpetually present’, or even ‘future-forward’, he insists that knowl-
edge of the past is needed for ‘growth, progression or forgiveness’.78 This is a
resolutely ‘therapeutic model of history’, interested less in retrieving or dis-
secting what has happened than in purging oneself of it, seeking ‘redemption
326 K. BODDY

from the past for the present’.79 A similar drive toward reconciliation charac-
terises Underworld and Eat the Document, but Homes associates this
approach with her beliefs as ‘a Jewish Buddhist’: ‘I’m constantly trying to
feel like, How do we let go of things? How do we not let our future be com-
pletely tainted by the past, but also be cognisant of that past?’80 In May We Be
Forgiven, letting go is rendered literally: a physical purge (involving special
South African teas) is what Harold needs to expel the ‘foul’ thing, the ‘rusty
sense of disgust’ that has accumulated over the many years he’s been
working on a book about Richard Nixon.81
Coming to terms with Nixon requires Harold to eschew an analysis of his
political career and instead focus of his own ‘psychic connection’ to the Pre-
sident – his ‘relationship to stuff’, his ‘love of bowling’ or ‘his favourite candy,
Skittles’.82 The more we hear the more we recognise Nixon’s ‘dark’ and ‘com-
plicated’ personality as an amalgam of Harold, a junk-food-loving depressive
with a relationship to China (or at least a Chinese-American woman) who
likes ‘to think of himself as decent’, and George, an imaged-obsessed ‘para-
noid bully’ who is frightened of being alone.83 In reconciling the two ‘sides
of the coin’ that is Nixon – ‘integrity and deceit [… and] moral superiority
and arrogance’ – Harold is able to forgive the former President, and, in
doing so, to forgive his brother and himself.84
But history is not only an allegory of family. Harold also wants his readers
to think of Nixon as ‘the bridge between our prewar Depression-era culture
[when Nixon was young and ‘just coming into himself’] and the postwar pros-
perous American-dream America’, which ended with his resignation.85 The
American Dream that Nixon first encountered in the 1930s wasn’t about indi-
vidual success but encapsulated the belief that ‘life should be better and richer
and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or
achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth’.86 Nixon’s
change of perspective – coming to privilege personal over social ambitions
– was also, and has remained, America’s. Writing elsewhere, Homes has
decried the twenty-first-century’s ‘upsizing of the American Dream’:
‘inflated […] as if to distract us from an underlying depression – emotional
and economic; as though we are consuming, stuffing, and spoiling ourselves
to avoid our fear of failing, of falling, of having nothing at all’.87 This analysis,
which seems to be the starting point for both This Book Will Save Your Life and
May We Be Forgiven, builds on Christopher Lasch’s 1979 diagnosis of ‘the
culture of narcissism’. Both novels deal with the ongoing impact of ‘the prolifer-
ation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalisation of the inner life, the
cult of consumption’ and ‘the waning of the sense of historical time’.88
When Harold first arrives in Westchester he finds a ‘big history of Thomas
Jefferson’ by George’s bedside, a nod to the post-war suburban version of ‘the
Jeffersonian ideal of a house on a private piece of land’.89 Gradually, Harold
transforms the single-family home into something more than a ‘boarding
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 327

house’ but less than a commune, ‘adopting’ Ricardo, the Hispanic child
orphaned by George’s car accident, and later the aged parents of a woman
he meets in the mall.90 Repopulating the Dream’s ‘primary symbol’, Harold
is refuting popular 1990s jeremiads about the ‘innately introverted’ suburb,
as well as more recent calls for a ‘digitised version’ of communitarian life.91
By the end of the novel, Harold tells us that, for the ‘first time’ in his life,
he feels both ‘part of a community’ and mindfully ‘here, in the moment’.92
On this reading, the novel ends with the completion of a superior kind of
self-help programme, one that rejects Nixon-era ‘inward-turning self-cultiva-
tion’ in favour of the millennial ‘self-development’ that comes from ‘attach-
ments beyond the self’.93 While novelists in the 1970s worried about
‘individualism and sexual liberation’, David Foster Wallace said, his contem-
poraries feared ‘the prospect of dying without even once having loved some-
thing more than yourself’.94 These ideas, which are also at the heart of This
Book Will Save Your Life, are given a more overt political resonance in May
We Be Forgiven. The community that Harold creates within his home exists
within a nexus of other communal spaces, including a prison, cemetery,
boarding school, mall, psychiatric hospital, and nursing home, all of which
experiment with different ways of living. Together they suggest the recovery
of some approximation of the 1930s Dream that had ‘gone underground’.95
It was not unreasonable, Barack Obama declared in 2006, to think about
‘Reclaiming the American Dream’.96
While few cultural theorists used this kind of language, it can be connected
to an early twenty-first-century revival in what was variously described as
‘anti–anti-Utopianism’, ‘iconoclastic utopianism’, ‘post-utopian utopianism,
or utopian post-utopianism’.97 The last two are Marianne DeKoven’s formu-
lations, and she connects the mood to the ‘current postmodern … moment’.
What makes post-utopia postmodern, she argues, is its awareness of its limit-
ations: what it offers is necessarily ‘muted, partial, local, diffuse, multiple,
sceptical’ and always aware of its own, unavoidable ‘complicity’.98 Post-
utopian thinking, she insists, reminds us that ‘we are always within the
given of global, multinational, corporate consumer capitalism’ and the best
that can be done is to ‘ironize, distance, critique, subvert, resist those configur-
ations from within them.’99
The repurposed suburban home and family (the ‘little country’ that stands
for the big one) offers a good example of a utopianism ‘from within’, and
Homes goes some way to ironize its practices. Whenever anyone seems to
be ‘thinking all too well’ of himself and his beneficence, someone else
appears to pull him up short. For example, Harold thinks of his trip with
Ricardo to the Plaza’s Oak Room as ‘the most fun he’s had in years’, until
Ricardo tells him about the hard life of his cousin who worked at the hotel.
And when he finds himself ‘almost crying’ alongside Ricardo’s aunt, she chal-
lenges his claim to empathy: ‘What do you have to cry about? You’re a big
328 K. BODDY

white guy with a big house’. Self-consciousness about philanthropy only

increases when Harold and the kids raise money for the South African
village of Nateville (the narcissism of the name alerts us to the problem).
When Nate criticises the South African beneficiaries for not using the
money wisely, Harold reminds him that ‘they live in the same world as we
do’.100
And yet, in a novel about atonement and ‘reparations’, this kind of inocu-
lating irony is sporadic at best. Like self-help, gifts are good only if they are the
right kind. At the start of the novel, Harold is married to someone who ‘asked
very little’ of him but who also ‘gave very little back’. His initial response to
any kind of trouble is to look for a ‘gift shop’ while preserving a ‘life of
[his] own’. While this is immediately an improvement on George (who
believes himself ‘a gift of the gods’), shopping is not enough. Harold needs
to learn to treat his own ‘life as currency’, and then to work out where to
‘spend it’: ‘What’s the best value?’ These thoughts lead to further reflections
on the need for ‘some larger idea, some sense of enhancing the lives of
others’.101 In some ways Homes seems to be responding directly to the
remark in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), another novel of information, cata-
strophe, and atonement, that ‘money has lost its narrative quality’, and ‘is
talking to itself’.102 While the trajectory of DeLillo’s novel is toward self-pun-
ishment and self-destruction, May We Be Forgiven is about rich people giving
money back its narrative power. When Harold becomes a ‘human cash
machine’, keeping track of what comes in and what goes out of the family
coffers, he begins to value the way that money can inscribe history as well
as shape the future.103
In formulating these ideas, Homes seems to be drawing on Lewis Hyde’s
The Gift, a book begun in the late 1970s, published in 1983 and, following
its gradual rise to cult status, reissued in 2006.104 Building on earlier anthro-
pological work on gift economies, Hyde emphasises their social and spiritual
functions. Gifts, he argues, are ‘agents of transformation’ which ‘bespeak
relationships’, connecting people to each other and also ‘to the gods’. He dis-
cusses atonement (‘to atone is to reunite’) and emphasises that ‘human life is a
gift’.105 In May We Be Forgiven, we are meant to see a corollary between the
organ donation that has enabled Jane to continue to ‘save the lives of others’
and Harold’s own ‘gift of life’.106

The Gift of the GAN

Homes has always confronted assumptions about what women are ‘supposed’
to write. In The End of Alice, for example, she adopted the perspective of a
fifty-three year old paedophile in jail, rather than that of either of the
young female protagonists, because ‘women are not supposed to do things
that are not very, very nice’.107 May We Be Forgiven marks another stage in
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 329

her challenge to the premise that only ‘male writers … write broad social
novels. The great American novels’.108 And yet Homes is not ‘passing’ as a
writer of ‘guy books’, nor even attempting (as Franzen thinks he is) to over-
come ‘the sexual division of labour in American fiction’.109 Rather, just as The
End of Alice challenged us to reread works like Lolita, May We Be Forgiven
brings the whole ‘Great Literary American Novel Syndrome’ into sharp
relief.110
On the face of it, Harold is a familiar figure from GAN mythology. He has
spent fifteen years working on his book, dragging around a canvas bag con-
taining a ‘thirteen-hundred page manuscript, covered with an elaborate
system of Post-its and flags that seem entirely undecipherable’.111 We can
think of many similar figures. Recent examples include: a schoolteacher
who keeps his novel in two large manuscript boxes in the boot of his car
(the 2004 movie Sideways); a baker who refuses to be separated from his ‘col-
lection of worn notebooks, legal pads, typing papers, all of it scribbled on and
marked up, bound into a single passage with elastic bike cords’ (Tracy Letts’s
2010 play Superior Donuts); or, closest to Harold, a historian with a ‘beige
metal file cabinet’ containing ‘the makings of his multivolumed history of
Rockford, Illinois, a work that would be unprecedented in scale and ambition
(he hoped, on good days)’ (Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me).112 These hopeful if
shambolic authors are themselves descendants of DeLillo’s ubiquitous men
in small rooms: Jack Gladney, from White Noise, a ‘harmless, ageing, indis-
tinct’ guy who finds Hitler a ‘fine, solid, dependable’ object of study; Nicholas
Branch, from Libra, a retired CIA analyst, who, at the novel’s start, is ‘in his
fifteenth year’ in a ‘room of documents’ – ‘legal pads and cassette tapes are
everywhere … a massive file cabinet stuffed with documents so old and
densely packed they may be ready to ignite spontaneously’; and the novelist
Bill Gray, from Mao II, who wants ‘to live like other people’ but instead
spends ‘twenty-three years’ sitting amid ‘drifts of paper’ and ‘charts …
covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words’, ‘making
changes’, ‘whiting out and typing in’.113 Branch’s struggle to complete his
‘secret history’ of Kennedy’s assassination is perhaps most relevant, for, like
Harold, his problem is when ‘to stop assembling data’ and how to turn that
‘data-spew’, ‘notes in three-foot drifts’, into ‘actual finished prose’.114 The
important point is that, unlike all these other writers, Harold does finish his
book, and, although he strips to Maileresque shorts and feels as if he’s in a
‘boxing gym’, he does so without much fuss. ‘There is no more need for per-
fection’, he concludes; writing is simply a chore to be completed before ‘the
children come home’. And once the book is ‘cooked’, he can get back to
looking after the family.115
But Homes is not only interested in what it means to take novel out of the
realm of history and reinsert it into the domestic sphere, nor simply in sub-
verting what Reno, the artist-protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The
330 K. BODDY

Flamethrowers, calls the ‘long-winded narcissism’ and ‘burning need for

others to listen’ characteristic of an ‘old American novelist’.116 Rather she is
trying to imagine how the GAN fits into what Hyde would call the ‘female
commerce’ of ‘gift aesthetics’.117 On the one hand, this means abandoning
the Oedipal displacements needed to reach the top of Cheever’s ‘big league’
and thinking instead of allusion as a kind of acknowledgement of the ways
in which another author’s gift ‘leaves us altered’.118 While May We Be For-
given makes its fair share of jokes at the expense of heavyweight ‘champs’,
it also makes ‘eye contact’ with numerous friends and colleagues, including
Lynne Tillman, Grace Paley, Rick Moody, and David Remnick.119 But there
is a limit to what can be achieved with eye contact. If Homes enjoys building
a community, inviting everyone into her suburban novel, she also knows what
is needed to write herself into ‘the broader culture’ of bestseller lists and book
awards. By exploring the nation’s key concerns with a framework that
stretches from Jefferson to Nixon, Homes fulfils the Great American brief
of effort, ambition and the assumption of authority. Like Harold Silver, and
all the other compromised post-postmodernists and post-utopians, she has
allowed her gifts to make ‘peace with the market’.120

Notes
1. Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1997), p. 192.
2. Tim Adams, ‘How America Sold Its Soul to the Devil’, The Observer, July 13,
2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/13/fiction.reviews3.
3. John Updike, ‘An Upstate Saga’, The New Yorker, June 23, 2008. http://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/an-upstate-saga.
4. Robert Epstein, ‘The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach’, The Independent,
January 15, 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/
reviews/the-art-of-fielding-by-chad-harbach-6289666.html.
5. T. S. Perry, ‘American Novels’, North American Review (October 1872),
pp. 366–78 (378).
6. Katha Pollitt, ‘Franzenfreude, Continued’, The Nation, September 15, 2010.
https://www.thenation.com/article/franzenfreude-continued/; James English,
The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
7. Franzen’s quarrel with women’s popular fiction dated back to 2001 when he
withdrew The Corrections from the Oprah Book Club because he had ‘some
hope of actually reaching a male audience’. Terry Gross, ‘Novelist Jonathan
Franzen’, NPR, October 15, 2001. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=1131456.
8. Ruth Franklin, ‘The READ: Franzen Fallout’, The New Republic, September 7,
2010. https://newrepublic.com/article/77506/the-read-franzen-fallout-ruth-
franklin-sexism. On gender data, see Double X Blog, ‘Fact-Checking the Fran-
zenfreude: Is the New York Times’ book section really a boys’ club?’, Slate, Sep-
tember 2, 2010. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/09/
factchecking_the_franzenfreude.html?from=rss. On the annual ‘Count’
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 331

undertaken since 2010 by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, see http://www.
vidaweb.org/the-count/.
9. Jason Pinter, ‘Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner Speak Out on Franzen Feud’,
The Huffington Post, August 28, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-
pinter/jodi-picoult-jennifer-weiner-franzen_b_693143.html. Franzen
responded with remarks about the ‘Jennifer Weinerish self-promotion’
demanded by contemporary literary culture and, in his 2015 novel Purity,
with a jibe about the NYTBR’s belief that ‘Jonathan’ was ‘synonymous with
talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality’. Karl Kraus, The Kraus Project, translated
and annotated by Jonathan Franzen (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), p. 274;
Jonathan Frazen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), p. 207.
10. Cheryl Strayed and Pankaj Mishra, ‘Is There a Double Standard for Judging
Domestic Fiction?’ New York Times, May 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/
2015/05/17/books/review/is-there-a-double-standard-for-judging-domestic-
themes-in-fiction.html?_r=0.
11. Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Family Portrait as Metaphor for the ’90s’, New York
Times, September 4, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/books/books-
of-the-times-a-family-portrait-as-metaphor-for-the-90-s.html.
12. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 160. The novel by a
woman that Weiner felt did fulfil the paratextual brief is Anne Tyler’s
Digging to America (2006). Twitter, Aug 23, 2010. https://twitter.com/
jenniferweiner/status/21930482445.
13. Best Friends Forever, Weiner’s sixth novel, was published in 2009 and spent
eighteen weeks on the bestseller list. The Oprah Book Club asked whether
‘Richard and Walter [were] having a “bromance”’. ‘Freedom Book Club Discus-
sion: Producer Jill’s 3rd Post’, http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-
book-club-producer-jills-freedom-discussion-3.
14. Lev Grossman, ‘Jonathan Frazen: Great American Novelist’, Time, August 12,
2010: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2010185,00.html.
15. Genette, Paratexts, p. 160.
16. Chad Harbach, ‘MFA vs NYC’, in Harbach (ed.), MFA vs NYC: The Two Cul-
tures of American Fiction (New York: n+1/ Faber, 2014), pp. 9–28 (25).
17. Dennis Drabelle, ‘Review of Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding’, Washington
Post, September 5, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/
books/book-world-chad-harbachs-the-art-of-fielding-reviewed-by-dennis-
drabelle/2011/07/18/gIQAN3C14J_story.html].
18. Harbach, ‘MFA vs NYC’, p. 19.
19. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1850]),
p. 124.
20. Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 122; F.O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 37. ‘Gay studies had really taken
off’ when Harbach took a Melville seminar at Harvard. Frederick McKindra,
‘The Strategies of Baseball, Friendship and Love’, LAMBDA Literary, February
8, 2012. http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/02/06/chad-harbach-the-
strategies-of-baseball-friendship-and-love/. On Mailer’s reading of Matthies-
sen’s American Renaissance (1941), see J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer:
A Double Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 31.
332 K. BODDY

21. Harvey Breit, ‘Talk with Norman Mailer’ (1951), in J. Michael Lennon (ed.),
Conversations with Norman Mailer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1988), pp. 15–17 (15).
22. The acronym is usually capitalised, but Tillman prefers a deflating lower case.
Lynne Tillman, ‘A Fictional Past: The Myth of the “Great American Novel”’,
Frieze, 163 (May 2014). https://frieze.com/article/fictional-past.
23. Saul Bellow, ‘Man Underground’ (1952), in John Hersey (ed.), Ralph Ellison: A
Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 28–29
(29).
24. James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (London: Faber, 2000), pp. 193, 198, 211.
25. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking, 1960), pp. 3,
536.
26. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 3, 581.
27. Ralph Ellison, ‘The World and the Jug’, in John F. Callahan (ed.), The Collected
Essays (New York: Modern Library), p. 172.
28. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 121; Jonathan Freedman,
The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 13.
29. Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2014), p. 31; [John W. De Forest], ‘The Great American
Novel’, Nation, January 9, 1868, pp. 27–29 (28).
30. William James, Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, 7 June 1899, in Henry James
(ed.), The Letters of William James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1926),
vol. 2, p. 90. On ‘the culture of size in America, 1865–1930’, see Michael
Tavel Clarke, These Days of Large Things (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2007).
31. Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936),
p. 92.
32. Patricia Wald, Constituting Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995),
pp. 239–40.
33. Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990),
p. 65.
34. Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel, p. 39; Marianne DeKoven, A
Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Language (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. xvii; Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein, Ch. 2.
35. Gertude Stein, Four in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947),
p. 169; Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ,
and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 58.
36. Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (London: Sphere, 1969), p. 122;
Lynne Tillman, ‘A Fictional Past’.
37. Charles McGrath, ‘The Souped-Up, Knock-Out Total Fiction Experience’,
New York Times¸ April 17, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/
weekinreview/the-soupedup-knockout-total-fiction-experience.html?_r=0;
Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association (1968) (New York: Plume,
1971), p. 19.
38. Bill Henderson, ‘My Great American Novel’, Chicago Review, 26, no. 1 (1974),
pp. 52–64 (pp. 52–3). Although GAN debunking began almost as soon as the
phrase was coined, it was only in the 1970s that machismo became its main
component.
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 333

39. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 989. For a
more recent portrait of a male writer who prefers books by dead, white men
but worries ‘whether he was a bit misogynistic’, see Adelle Waldman, The
Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (London: William Heinemann, 2013), p. 57.
40. David Foster Wallace, ‘Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would
Sort of Think’, in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown, 2005),
pp. 51–59 (51). Franzen has written about his youthful ambition to ‘save the
American novel’, his anxiety about Gravity’s Rainbow, and his eventual
coming round to Roth and Updike. The Kraus Project, pp. 229, 181, 120–21.
See Michael Kalisch, ‘Correcting Philip: Reading Franzen Reading Roth’,
Philip Roth Studies (Fall 2017), 21–38.
41. Amy Hungerford discusses the ‘masculine cultural shape’ of that genre in
Making Literature Now (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 153;
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire (London: Vintage, 2016), pp. 5, 867.
42. Franzen, Purity, pp. 186–87. This is another joke about the New York Times
Book Review.
43. Harbach, The Art of Fielding, p. 328; David Foster Wallace quoted in D.T. Max,
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (New York: Viking, 2012), p. 199.
44. Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers (London: Virago, 2010), p. 578; Roth, ‘On
The Great American Novel’, in Reading Myself and Others (London: Penguin,
1985), pp. 75–92 (92).
45. Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), p. 14.
46. Katy Guest, ‘Joyce Carol Oates’, The Independent, August 23, 2007. http://www.
independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/joyce-carol-oates-a-
teacher-academic-and-one-of-the-most-prodigious-novelists-of-all-time-
462721.html.
47. Tillman was born in 1947, Homes in 1961. Tillman, ‘A Fictional Past’; Jane Cia-
battari, ‘A.M. Homes on Her New Novel May We Be Forgiven’, Daily Beast,
Sept 29, 2012. http://www.thedailybeast.com/am-homes-on-her-new-novel-
may-we-be-forgiven. I discuss Tillman’s engagement with the ‘genre’, focusing
on American Genius: A Comedy (2006), in ‘Lynne Tillman and the Great Amer-
ican Novel’, electronic book review (July 2011). http://www.
electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/american.
48. Kira Cochrane, ‘A.M. Homes Interview’, The Guardian, June 7, 2013. https://
www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/07/am-homes-interview-womens-
prize-fiction.
49. Richard Wolinsky, ‘Out of the Darkness: Interview with A.M. Homes’, Guer-
nica, November 15, 2012. https://www.guernicamag.com/out-of-the-
darkness/.
50. Tillman, ‘A Fictional Past’.
51. A.M. Homes and Yuka Igarashi, ‘A.M. Homes Interview’, Granta, 124, Online
Edition, June 6, 2013. https://granta.com/interview-am-homes/.
52. George Mandel, ‘Literary Dialogue with Joseph Heller’ (1970), in Adam
J. Sorkin (ed.), Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1993), pp. 61–77 (pp. 67–68). As young man, Cheever had been
‘impressed’ particularly by the ‘size’ of The Naked and the Dead and had got
the ‘heaves’ reading reviews of The Adventures of Augie March. He fantasised
about writing a book so ‘massive’ that ‘you’ll be able to lift it to the sound of
outboard motors’. John Cheever, The Journals (London: Vintage, 1993),
pp. 13, 33; Robert Cromie, ‘Book Beat’, in Scott Donaldson (ed.), Conversations
334 K. BODDY

with John Cheever (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), pp. 44–57
(52). Homes has said that Falconer ‘may, in fact, be The Great American
Novel – or at least the greatest American novel of the last 30 years.’ ‘Introduc-
tion’ to John Cheever, Falconer (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. vii–x (vii).
53. Homes, May We Be Forgiven (London: Granta, 2012), p. 471. ‘The train ride
from midtown Manhattan to the picture-book Westchester suburb where
DeLillo lives,’ wrote Anthony De Curtis, ‘offers a capsule view of virtually the
entire spectrum of American life.’ ‘“An Outsider in This Society”: An Interview
with Don DeLillo’, in Thomas DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), pp. 52–74 (54).
54. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 62, 298, 339.
55. Nicholas Dames, ‘Seventies Throwback Fiction’, n+1, 21 (Winter 2015). https://
nplusonemag.com/issue-21/reviews/seventies-throwback-fiction/.
56. Charles Finch, ‘Buying a Way Past Death: Zero K by Don DeLillo’, Chicago
Tribune, April 28, 2016. http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-
prj-zero-k-don-delillo-20160428-story.html.
57. DeLillo, Underworld, p. 34; Christian Lorentz, ‘The Genius of Don DeLillo’s
Post-Underworld Work’, Vulture, May 2, 2016. http://www.vulture.com/
2016/04/genius-of-don-delillos-post-underworld-work.html.
58. Lorentz, ‘The Genius of Don DeLillo’s Post-Underworld Work’. Consistently
praised for the ‘ambition’ of Look at Me, particularly when compared to her
‘circumscribed’ first novel, Jennifer Egan mentioned Underworld (‘Not that
I’m saying my book’s as good as that, but they’re similar in that they’re both
complicated books with multiple plotlines’). ‘Briefly Noted’, New Yorker,
October 29, 2001. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/10/29/look-at-
me-3; Ron Hogan, ‘Interview with Jennifer Egan’, IndieBound. http://www.
indiebound.org/author-interviews/eganjennifer.
59. ‘Rachel Kushner: By the Book’, New York Times Book Review, February 6, 2014.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/rachel-kushner-by-the-
book.html?_r=0; Sophie De Rosee, ‘The World of Rachel Kushner’, The Tele-
graph, January 14, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/
authorinterviews/10589332/The-world-of-author-Rachel-Kushner.html.
60. Jennifer Egan, Introducing DeLillo, NBA Distinguished Contribution to Amer-
ican Letters, 2015. https://youtu.be/1XiSC3ozVBQ.
61. Maria Nadotti, ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in DePietro (ed.), Conversa-
tions with Don DeLillo, pp. 109–18 (115).
62. ‘A.M. Homes, winner of the women’s prize for fiction, talks to Jeanette Winter-
son’, The Guardian, June 10, 2013. https://youtu.be/SEIIv6cyHx0; Kevin Con-
nolly, ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in DePietro (ed.), Conversations with
Don DeLillo, pp. 25–39 (28).
63. Kim Echlin, ‘Baseball and the Cold War’, in DePietro (ed.), Conversations with
Don DeLillo, pp. 145–51 (148).
64. Nadotti, ‘An Interview’, p. 115.
65. Of course, not every woman writer has followed this pattern. While the title of
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) might suggest a homage to
Americana, its heroine, a Nigerian immigrant who ‘hungered to understand
everything about America’, remains unconvinced by the books recommended
by her Princeton boyfriend, ‘novels written by young and youngish men and
packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and
music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 335

sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.’ Americanah (London: Fourth

Estate, 2014), pp. 135, 11–12.
66. Kasia Boddy, Unpublished Interview with A.M. Homes, 1999.
67. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 444; DeLillo, Underworld, pp. 513–14.
68. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 257, 213.
69. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 51, 66, 101.
70. Homes locates the inspiration for this in Cheever’s ‘Goodbye, My Brother’ as well
as Falconer. Ciabattari, ‘A.M. Homes on Her New Novel May We Be Forgiven’.
71. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 230.
72. Ibid., pp. 298, 468.
73. ‘What I did not understand,’ reflects one of Cheever’s narrators, ‘was how a
world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet.’
‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’. The Collected Stories (London: Penguin,
1982), pp. 253–69 (268).
74. Joseph Heller, Something Happened (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 36.
75. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 293, 49, 2, 414. Homes shares DeLillo’s belief
in the resilience of children, in their ability to ‘find a way.’ Underworld, p. 673.
76. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 261; Don DeLillo, Libra (London: Penguin,
1988), p. 211.
77. Wolinsky, ‘Out of the Darkness’. Richard Ford also uses Thanksgiving to
connect the personal, the suburban and the national, although more pessimis-
tically, in The Lay of the Land (2007).
78. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 97, 277.
79. Christopher Colvin, ‘“Brothers and Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid of Me”: Trauma,
History and the Therapeutic Imagination in the New South Africa’, in Kathar-
ine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested
Pasts (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 153–68 (158).
80. Wolinsky, ‘Out of the Darkness’.
81. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 447, 418.
82. Ibid., pp. 182, 76, 169. This again follows DeLillo’s mandate for fiction which
‘slips into the skin of historical figures. It gives them sweaty palms and head
colds and urine-stained underwear and lines to speak in private and the
terror of restless nights.’ ‘The Power of History’, New York Times, September
7, 1997. http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html.
83. Wolinsky, ‘Out of the Darkness’; Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 448.
84. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 188, 446.
85. Ibid., pp. 202, 264.
86. Ibid., p. 264, quoting James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1931), p. 405. On Nixon as one of the Dream’s ‘most avid spokes-
persons’, see Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Dream: A Cultural History
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), pp. 81, 77–78.
87. A.M. Homes, Los Angeles (Washington: National Geographic, 2002), p. 17.
88. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp. 32, 3. Early
twenty-first-century reworkings of these themes include David G. Myers’s
American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
89. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 12; Samuel, The American Dream, p. 6. Homes
has described Music for Torching as ‘very much about the American Dream,
which I think came out of World War 2 and into the development of suburbia
336 K. BODDY

and the notion of prosperity, and kind of fell apart in the sixties and seventies.’
Boddy, Unpublished Interview, 1999.
90. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 477. ‘To be adopted,’ Homes wrote of her own
experience, ‘is to be adapted, to be amputated and sewn back together again.’
The Mistress’s Daughter (London: Granta, 2007), p. 54.
91. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 294; Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Col-
lapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2000), p. 210.
92. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 433, 478.
93. Marianne De Koven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Post-
modern (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), p. 255; Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and
American Literature in the Age of Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2015), 41.
94. Wallace, ‘Certainly the End of Something’, p. 54.
95. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 264.
96. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American
Dream (New York: Crown/Three Rivers Press, 2006).
97. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), p. xvi;
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 85; De Koven, Utopia,
Limited, p. 269.
98. De Koven, Utopia, Limited., pp. 272, 25.
99. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
100. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 463, 387, 337, 462.
101. Ibid., pp. 31, 11, 25, 1, 463, 435–6.
102. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (London: Picador, 2004), p. 77.
103. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 463.
104. Hyde’s fans include Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem.
See Lee Konstaninou, ‘Lewis Hyde’s Double Economy’, ASAP/Journal, 1.1
(2016), pp. 123–49.
105. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Edin-
burgh: Canongate, 2007), pp. 139, 71, 60, 69, 97.
106. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 49, 454.
107. Kasia Boddy, Unpublished Interview with A.M. Homes, 1996.
108. Jennifer Gilmore, ‘A.M. Homes’ Novel Addresses ’70s Childhood’, Forward,
October 23, 2012. http://forward.com/culture/164618/am-homes-novel-
addresses-70s-childhood/.
109. Wolinsky, ‘Out of the Darkness’; Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American
Fiction at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 103.
110. Laura Miller, ‘Why Can’t a Woman Write the Great American Novel?’, Salon.
http://www.salon.com/2009/02/24/elaine_showalter/.
111. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, p. 59.
112. Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts (New York: Theatre Communications Groups,
2010), p. 31; Jennifer Egan, Look at Me (London: Corsair, 2011), p. 133.
113. DeLillo, White Noise, pp. 83, 89; Libra, p. 14; Don DeLillo, Mao II (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1991), pp. 55, 51, 36, 35, 53, 55.
114. DeLillo, Libra, pp. 59, 15.
115. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 453, 446.
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 337

116. Reno also feels ‘a sudden tenderness’ for the heavy-drinking, ping-pong-
playing, misogynistic author ‘and the burden he bore’. Rachel Kushner, The
Flamethrowers (London: Vintage, 2014), pp. 222, 251.
117. Hyde, The Gift, pp. 105, 143.
118. Ibid., p. 46.
119. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, pp. 383, 84, 53, 438. In her acknowledgements,
Homes also thanks Yaddo, a writers’ retreat committed to ‘culture as a gift’.
Micki McGee, ‘Creative Power and the Making of American Culture’, in
McGee (ed.), Yaddo: Making American Culture (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2008), pp. 1–16 (1).
120. Hyde, The Gift, p. 278.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.