There’s another crisis in criticism. It seems that very short periods of time are allowed to pass before a critic or author once again declares that the novel has died. This year, the privilege has fallen upon Leo Siegel of the New York Observer to sound the death knell of the one great American Novel, the books that made a huge and enduring cultural impact from author like Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck or Salinger. It is Siegel’s view that, “…fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers.” But as the Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe points out the whole thing is in fact rather cliche and seems to be the privilige of each new generation to declare that it was during their era that ‘fiction’ truly died. Thorpe argues, “Declaring the death of the novel is now almost as much of a literary tradition as the novel itself. American writers, proud of their canon – from Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, to John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow – are, alternately, eager to kill off the genre and exasperated by their long wait for the next big writer.”

I’d argue that it is the publishing world that has changed as it has been forced over the years to compete – not only against itself – but with the money making demands of the entertainment industry and now the stupefying amount of information available online. I’d like to know what contemporary works from any creative or artistic sphere (visual art, music, theatre, literature) hold anything like the cultural precedence that those 20th Century American novels commanded over the years since their publication? Visual art, for example, seemed to become immediately aware of its position as an index for capital in the late Capitalist / neo liberal sphere and adapted to its new societal role with great aplomb. As such, there has been significantly less drama attached to the changes that have occurred in the art world in comparison to the resentment literary critics attach to the authors’ of the day.  The reoccurring argument of ‘beauty’ in art can possibly be likened to the laborious repetition with which top literary critiques enjoy declaring something (fiction, literature, poetry) to have died. Both arguments seem to surface once every few years without ever really shedding new light on why the same arguments are continually raised.

Looking at things across the pond, I am greatly envious of the American publishing tradition and in opposition to Siegel, I’d argue that it is the American’s who have acclimatised to the changes in popular culture and that their authors usurped the ambition and productivity of British authors many many years ago. In fact, because of Britain’s regressive infatuation with multi-culturalism in its writing, I believe that the great novels are a lot more likely to come from America than from Britain, the industry that lays claim to being the originator of both the language and the form.

But surely something can only be said to be great if it stands the test of time? Has enough time passed to declare fiction as being dead? Here are some American novels that (i think) could one day be considered great…………

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