I started the Great American Novel once. Really. It was the summer after my first year, that tumultuous series of epiphanies, when the world somehow conspires to confront you with everything you thought was wrong -- and then shows you everything that is right. Exactly.
So I was fresh from self-revelation, and I gave a wearied heavy sigh, like I was taking the philosophical cares of the world into my poor artistic hands, and I sat down to my computer (I know the Great American Novel should be written on a typewriter, a much more romantic mechanism, but what to do without spell check, and the High Tower Text font?) and tentatively sprawled my hands over my keyboard.
I stared into the pure, mocking abyss of the white screen, and let me tell you, I almost crumpled myself up like a useless piece of paper and tossed myself into the wastebasket. I almost gave up. But then, a life-saving flash-bulb moment.
Hemingway wrote standing up, didn't he? And he was great, right? I tried that for about a minute, but it got old pretty fast. Oh well, he did also commit suicide -- maybe I should try a different, safer, approach.
I skimmed my fingers over the keys, creating a nice, productive sound, like the patter of rain on a tin roof, so maybe my sisters in the next room would think I was getting along quite well in my Great American Novel.
How to get across the jadedness, the cynicism of witnessing the dehumanization of our society caused by commercialization?To share my wisdom (that had been obtained at a great cost, that is, in exchange for my naiveté, optimism, faith in humanity, etc.) in a way that was new, and resonant, that would strike an emotional chord with readers.That would explain, in the words of a favorite teacher, why our country was going down the crapper. I increasingly realized that my Great American Novel was going to be somewhat anti-American. Well, hmmm, I would deal with that later. Actually, that would be so perfect, so ironic, so paradoxical, so bleak, so post-modern. I loved where this was going.
I obviously was experiencing a horrific bout of writer's block, so I put up an away message on AIM, and Googled a query for help with writer's block. Thank goodness for Google. One helpful page suggested typing something, anything, a word or phrase, just to put some black letters on the page. In a presumptuous attempt at humility, I typed "draft" at the top of the page.
Okay, stage two, according to the Web site: Inspiration. I brainstormed a list of possible Great American Novels, if I had to assume it was already written (a nearly disastrous thought, I confess). I come up with a list of a few: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. I go to my bookshelf and pull out the aforementioned books and read the first sentences. I love Harper Lee, but really, I don't feel to be in the grips of a masterpiece after: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." Salinger, however, was inspiring, acerbic and blunt: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
It was like giving the finger to the world, but somehow giving it a hug of sympathy at the same time, meaning, isn't it so damn hard to be alive.
I still didn't have a sentence, so I progressed to stage three. I went to my sister for aid. The first thing she did was notify me there already was a Great American Novel. Crap. How was I not informed of this? I checked trusty Amazon.com, and there was in fact a novel of this name by Philip Roth. Clever guy. But I could just write the Greater, or the Greatest American Novel. I win. Ha.
Oh, and as I continued to investigate, I discovered this novel was about baseball. Well he clearly did not write the same kind of novel as I was going to, about the struggle of the self to find the truth of existence in a melting pot culture. I asked my sister what she thought the Great American Novel should be about. She said, "Football. Because Americans are obsessed with it although it's dumb. Because Americans are dumb."
Right.
So I return to my computer feeling frustrated and quite nervous that some other college student was going to write what I was going to write, before I could write it. There could only be so many truths in the world.
And so finally, I write a sentence.
"It was the summer after my first year in college."
It was also the last sentence, fortunate for my literary reputation, preserved in a wonderfully sparse document file on a black floppy disk along with the papers from my first-year classes.
Oh, but don't be mistaken, the novel is coming. Although it probably will be more like, the sub-par, self-depreciating, American as in from Northern Virginia, but obsessed with the British, and maybe not so novel, maybe regurgitating old themes, old characters, more personal than universal, pretending not to be autobiographical. Ah, you get the idea.
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