Best American Fiction writers

On Sunday, the New York Times published a list of the best works of American fiction of the last 25 years, chosen by 125 or so judges (whose company I was invited to join, but in the end didn't). The usual suspects were all on it: Toni Morrison's Beloved. Don DeLillo's Underworld, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (tied with Updike), and Philip Roth's American Pastoral. They were usual not only because their authors are the biggest names in American literature, but also because the books named were sprawling ones. While these are all excellent, even great, novels, their presence at the top of the list may tell us something about our unconscious cultural biases against the so-called small novel. Generalizations are odious, but if you peruse the extended shortlist—17 more books—you'll find that even the fiction there is in some sense "large." The only exceptions are Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (a story collection), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

The bias against the short novel has deep roots. The American novel (and American canon-making) has always been a highly self-conscious enterprise. The aim of our early writers was not merely to write a great work of art, but to make a great American work of art. Yet early on American writers were anxious about what James Fenimore Cooper worried in 1828 was a "poverty of materials." It wasn't until Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman seized on what Philip Rahv called "the tensions and hazards" of the American experience that our literature began to look robust, imaginative, and new to its own creators and early critics. They made up for the perceived "paucity of ingredients" with an impressively self-conscious gusto; their methods were as big as their vision. Consider Whitman's sprawling poetic line, his insistent use of anaphora; James' knotted, lengthy sentences, and his protracted epics of social mores, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors; or Melville's Moby-Dick.

In the decades that followed, our notion of the great American novel became entwined with a perception that shorter books weren't, somehow, as serious. Seriousness required self-consciousness, and self-consciousness required expansiveness. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, he and Maxwell Perkins worried that it was too short; indeed, the book—a mere 50, 000 words or so—did less well commercially than his earlier novels. Complaining that it never became a best seller, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend about his misjudgment: "It was too short. Remember this. Never write a book under sixty thousand words." Luckily for Fitzgerald, his closing pages draw back to meditate, self-consciously, on the nature of the tension between the private and the public in America, offering a prime example of what Philip Rahv once said was the ur-aim of American literature: to contemplate "the discrepancy between the high promise of the American dream and what history has made of it."

The notion that "small" novels are unworthy of high critical esteem has been especially pervasive of late. Somewhere along the way, the critique of the small novel got bound up with a critique of the well-crafted novel that proliferated with the rise of MFA programs. Even as Gatsby, Lolita, and Rabbit Run (all short novels) entered our canon, the "small" novel became inextricably linked in critic's minds with domestic and generally female novels of the sort that Gail Caldwell, the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, indicted in a 2003 interview, when she lamented the dire state of American fiction. "There are a great number of contemporary fiction writers who go for the myopic sensitive-heart rending personal blah, blah, blah, blah, blah small novel, " she complained, announcing her love of "big brilliant novels" and praising the panoramic skills of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. In 2004, after the National Book Award nominees were announced—in an act of apparent rebelliousness, the judges had chosen five short, lyrical books by women, leaving off Philip Roth's Plot Against America—Caryn James wrote in the New York Times that the real problem with the finalists was not that they were unknown, but that they did not write "big, sprawling novels."

What's been lost in the conflation of "small" and "small-minded" is the recognition that small books can be powerful vehicles for big ideas—to say nothing of powerful examples of aesthetic rigor. In his otherwise astute essay accompanying the Times' list, A.O. Scott succumbed to a form of category confusion when he explained the absence of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in the top five by noting that they are "small" books that do not "generalize" but "document"—a peculiar misreading of both novels, which hardly shy away from probing large themes, and do so with metaphoric richness. In fact, plenty of big novels do far more documenting than these two masterpieces.

This odd assertion—emblematic of the broader cultural confusion—raises a question that no one seems to have a satisfying answer to: What exactly makes a novel small, aside from its length? And if we don't know, is the term more of an obstacle than an aid in taking stock of great literature? The Great Gatsby, after all, might seem to be a small book: It is a novel of "lyric incisiveness, " as Claudia Roth-Pierpont has put it, and deals with a small group of characters over a relatively short period of time. The narrative is a single thread, filtered through Nick Carraway's narration, rather than the intricate crosscutting—a la Underworld or The Corrections—that characterizes "big" novels. Clearly, part of what makes Gatsby seem big in our eyes today is that it frames its tale as a purposeful meditation on the American dream, and its propulsive last page explicitly deals with the tension between nostalgia for and disenchantment with our past's promise of an innocent future.