Matt Ely's Reviews > The Great American Novel

A very difficult book to rate. My feelings about it swung around wildly, and I'm not sure where to land. This is not helped by the fact that Roth spends part of the epilogue writing negative reviews of the book you've just read, so you feel a little silly agreeing with the critiques he saw coming before publication.

The title is such a challenge! You know that it isn't what it purports to be because the great American novel wouldn't refer to itself as such. Right? So the book is lying to you from the cover. It starts with the testimonial of the fictional author of the main text, an alliterative addict named Word Smith. And that's not a name. Right? So it's fiction. It's silly. It's clearly silly, right? But you knew that going in of course. It told you on the cover it was a novel, so why shouldn't he be named Word Smith? Would John Smith be any less fictional?

As you weave through Smith's "historical novel" telling the stories of the forgotten Patriot Baseball League, you meet some well-named and unreal characters. Gil Gamesh. Luke Gofannon. Hothead Ptah. Nickname Damur. Applejack Terminus. These unreal fictional characters talk you through America in 1943. In this great American novel, we visit America's Greatest Generation.

And it sucks. For large stretches of the book you will be left wondering where the joke is, who it's on, whether the levels of irony have been stacked too high that they come out as sincerity. The text is, on its surface (as the epilogue itself acknowledges), unkind to every demographic available. The discrimination of power against powerless is not subtle and it's not debatable; it's right there. The novel does not condemn it; the novel reports it. At times, it even appears to condone it. This makes for an uncomfortable read. Even as you believe that Roth has a purpose in choosing the approach, that doesn't make it enjoyable.

But Roth didn't write this novel; Word Smith wrote this novel, this Great American Novel. For a novel that claims to tell the defining story of the nation to be confrontingly and unrelentingly cruel to everyone who is not a wealthy, white American man... well when you step back, perhaps that is not so odd as it seems in the moment.

It's not perfect, but my goodness is it ambitious! It's not always enjoyable to read, frankly, and in its 400 pages there might be some diversions that are more necessary than others (once again, a critique Roth anticipates in his epilogue). But the layers of doubt and questions of authorship make this unlike most books you'll read. This is fiction that makes the reader reassess reality in a way that only fiction can do. I think, even if only for that uncommon impression alone, it's worth reading.