Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.
My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.