Can any single novel be that large, contain such multitudes?
Writing novels is not a competitive sport, is it?
Is there any debate whatsoever that invokes The Great British Novel? As in, There Can Only Be One? (even Only One in Every Generation)
Even I, besotted Middlemarch and George Eliot fan than I am, am not going to say MM is The, rather than A, Great British Novel.
So I really rather like the responses to that question about The Great American Novel here with the proviso By A Woman.
The scholar Nina Baym has pointed out how “stories of female frustration are not perceived as commenting on, or containing, the essence of our culture.” Stories of male frustration, on the other hand - especially those “melodramas of beset manhood” in which men struggle with the siren call of comfort and domesticity - jibe more neatly with what we expect serious literature to be. Men’s self-discovery is hunting for big game; women’s self-discovery amounts to tidying up around the house.
Paging Virginia Woolf for an earlier and more laconic version of this: 'This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
I like Mohsin Hamid's remark that the GAN is
a mythological beast, an impossible mountaintop, a magical vale in the forest, a place to get storytellers dreaming of one day reaching.
which so fits into a certain male kind of narrative. Rather than, you know, being in one's own backgarden or among 2 or 3 families in a country parish...
And as I have heretofore remarked myself, to get a real perspective on what constitutes an enduring novel of lasting interest and relevance to readers, you need time. And what time so often shows is that it is not The Big Bow-Wow Strain that stays the course (to do Sir Walter Scott, he appears to have got this).
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