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Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

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From: International Herald Tribune
Date: 20060517
Author:A.O. Scott

A.O. Scott
International Herald Tribune
05-17-2006
More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that ''the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff,'' an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, ''The Great American Novel.'' It pointedly isn't no one counts it among Roth's best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris's legendary beast. The hippogriff, a monstrous ...

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