Because despite all the approximations, this is quite clearly not a duck. If it sounds like a duck and smells like a duck and moves like a duck, it’s probably a …well, you get the picture. It’s big (540 pages) and it deals with a WASP family from the Midwest, with the usual stresses and fault lines just under the surface, that break out with dramatic consequences in the second half. Looked at from the outside, at a distance and standing in the shadows it could be mistaken for TGAN, but it really wouldn’t pass muster in an ID line up under harsh neon strip lighting. Let’s be clear right from the outset, this novel is a long way from being great.
It’s just a shame that the one he fails miserably to reach is the most important. Well, two out of three isn’t bad, I suppose. Jonathan Franzen has laboured for a good few years under the burden of this label, ever since The Corrections was published in 2001, and Crossroads is his latest epic that lays claim to the title, Great American Novel. The Great American novelist has been subject to regular reinvention – now a woman, now someone of colour – but the essential premise is the same: this is a great stylist, working on a large canvas, to portray some quintessential truth about a great country. The writer in question (usually a white man) needs to have written a very long book, to be able to bear the weight of cultural expectation. This is the mindset that periodically proclaims someone to be the latest carrier of that torch. “Give us some respect”, it seems to shout, “we’re just as good as you failed old Europeans. It speaks to a notion of America being both looked down on for its cultural poverty at the same time as being lionised as the world’s major superpower, politically and economically. American pre-eminence in the new cultures of the Twentieth century only serves to sharpen the longing for recognition of their excellence in proper culture – fine art and literary fiction – rather than the bubble gum worlds of the movies, TV and pulp fiction. The very idea seems to me born out of a longing for old school respectability in the ranks of American commentators. For a certain type of contemporary fiction lover, there exists a fascination with the pursuit of The Great American Novel.
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