The Great American Novel List: American Regions, Part 2

The second and the third novels on my list of the Great American novels of the regions have to do with New England / Midwest and Appalachia. And, yes, they are long. But bear with me. I promise there will be very short novels on the list, too.

Also, as promised, these are not going to be modernist novels. These are naturalism, which is a variety of reallist literature, in the first case, and postmodern social realism in the second. They are easy to read but they require a significant time investment.

Without further ado, I present to you the novel that I have read maybe 15 times in spite of it being so incredibly long, and it is:

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.

I couldn’t begin to imagine when I first read it as a teenager in the USSR that the differences between New England and the Midwest that the novel explores would become so central to my own life.

The novel is shockingly relevant to our reality today. A Midwestern boy from a religious family of a very conservative preacher abandons his traditional upbringing and tries to join the ranks of the coastal New England elite. Tension between sexual immorality and social striving is the main theme of the book. In Dreiser’s times, as in ours, voracious self indulgence was the enemy of success.

Beyond these extremely interesting and important themes, the novel portrays the daily life of the early 20th century America in so much delicious detail that this alone makes it worth reading.

The third novel on the American Regions list is

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

I wrote about it fairly recently here, and I won’t repeat myself.

What the three novels have in common is that they all depict striving, determined, fascinating men. This doesn’t mean that these male characters are successful in their striving. Their quests can end in terrible failure. But what is interesting – and very American – is that the cause of their failures is always within themselves.

The next installments in this series will include the great American novels of academia, the great sci-fi and fantasy novels, the great American romance, and others.