The Great Novels, R.I.P.

A meditation upon something that once mattered, and passed away unnoticed.

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Last year was the 100^th anniversary of the publication of what was once considered the greatest of Great American Novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The once-renown Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (remember him?) was so enamored of it he would copy entire pages from Gatsby just to feel what it was like to type out such prose with his own hands, “to feel it in my own nervous system.” It used to be taught in schools, because it was the greatest of the Great American Novels. Not that that was such a good thing, but that’s another complaint I may yet get to.

The point is, I remember not the slightest mention of the centennial of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby  on social media, or anywhere else.

This year is the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway used to be someone. As in, America’s Most Famous Writer, renown for decades after his death in 1961. No mention of him either. He got his start in what are remembered as the Roaring 20s, the Jazz Age, etc. Novels used to matter. Writing used to matter. Look up novels written in that decade. It was an embarrassment of riches, not just in America, but all over. That is, if you like to read.

What do we call the 2020’s? Decades used to matter, too, but that’s another lament entirely. America and Europe are long since finished, and so is that thing that used to be called “literature.” As the popular 1960s/1970s novelist Kurt Vonnegut (remember him?) would say, “So it goes.”

As for the aforementioned complaint I indicated I may yet get to—I’m getting to it. Teaching these novels didn’t entirely kill interest in them, but they certainly did not help. I think of my son, who was in high school in the early 2010s. He never had The Great Gatsby, or any Fitzgerald or Hemingway assigned to him. He might have enjoyed Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, but White male authors were off the curriculum. Instead, he got dreary, tedious things like The House on Mango Street assigned to him. If this was supposed to interest him in the lives of dull-minded Latina girls, I can’t see how. I read the book after he did. It was one of those things you force yourself through and couldn’t tell anyone what it was about when it was done.

He had themes he was supposed to find, like coins in a sandbox. It didn’t matter how many he listed, the teacher insisted he “Go deeper!” Eventually, he figured out that he was supposed to recite the “social justice” mantras of “Racism bad, immigrants are more American than me,” etc. At least he enjoyed The Life of Pi, if only as a survival-at-sea novel, but just as the Great Search for Symbolism wore down so many of my classmates in the 1970s, his teacher’s insistence on  “going deeper” to find the anti-racism clichés ended any and all interest he had in reading novels.

I tried to get him to read Slaughterhouse Five, as it was Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist recall of being taken as a prisoner of war in Germany and surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden. I’d thought he’s be all over Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline, as it was about honor and masculinity and surviving military college. He made polite excuses not to, as the copies I have were deluxe hardcover editions. I bought paperbacks. They sat around unread. After a while, I finally realized that my son, who preferred Calvin and Hobbes comic strip compilations and how-to books, considered novels to be an tiresome grind and a waste of time. Explaining that I never let the tiresome grind of English classes ruin my experience reading on my own for my own selfish pleasure was useless. Novels, to him were useless. If he needed entertainment badly enough he’d watch a movie, but even that was only when one of his girlfriends insisted upon it as something to do.

Granted, much of my son’s antipathy for novels stems from his practical nature. But the modern educational system didn’t help. He was apologetic when he told me not to expect an A in English classes. Once his teachers discovered he was on the football team, he had to work twice as hard as everyone else to score a B, no matter how many social justice clichés he’d learned to regurgitate. At least he scored that B.

My son’s overall experience, however, was not unique. In this great and grand 21^st century, novels are no longer the province of men looking to vicariously enjoy the adventures of other men and have their courage tested and reinforced by the tribulations and mortal they faced. Modern series like Twilight and Harry Potter, were clearly for girls. And why read, when you can wait for the inevitable movie adaptation your girlfriend will drag you off to?

So it goes. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have homeschooled. Live and learn, and all that smooth jazz.

I Drink for Reasons.