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John Hillcoat's film version of The Road.
Nowhere left to go? ... Kodi Smit-McPhee (right) and Viggo Mortensen in John Hillcoat’s film version of The Road. Photograph: PR
Nowhere left to go? ... Kodi Smit-McPhee (right) and Viggo Mortensen in John Hillcoat’s film version of The Road. Photograph: PR

Has US literature woken from the American dream?

This article is more than 8 years old

The national myth of happiness pursued and won has always been contested in fiction – and its promise seems almost extinct in some contemporary novels

Last month, I went to see a traveling painting show at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. The show was a greatest hits survey of mostly mid to late 19th- early 20th-century US art. The accompanying text explained that after the civil war, the aesthetics of the country shifted away from representations of the war’s devastation in favour of nostalgic, idealistic images of country suitors and boat parties or endless Frederic Remington-esque heroic cowboys and marauding Native Americans in the wild west. (Never mind the fact that the “untamed” west had already been colonised, and, with the Homestead Act of 1862, the government had been giving swaths of land to interested white settlers like a Manifest Destiny fire sale.)

Casing the galleries, I was struck by this wilful avoidance of darker, pressing realities. Art preferred to revel in a certain pastoral romanticism that seemed to promise the limitless expansion of the American dream. Only in one of the last galleries, devoted to the 1900s Ashcan school, did painters merge imported impressionistic techniques with gritty, impoverished cityscapes of the New York waterfront. More signage told the story: The Ashcan school was not very popular. I thought about the current state of the artworld in New York, where, in the midst of predatory capitalism, global disenchantment with the American ethos, and the widening gulf between rich and poor, a new form of painterly abstraction was the reigning genre. Once again, visual art seemed to be washing its hands of bleaker truths.

Literature, on the other hand, has always taken a more complicated and occasionally far more direct, moralistic stance on the American dream in the face of everyday struggle – even, or especially, when that dream is packed in a moving truck, driven out of the city, and restaged in some sort of pastoral Eden. One could argue that the American dream is the subject of every American novel, a sort of blurry-eyed national obsession with having it all and coming out on top, or in the case of most plot-driven literature, the failures and breakdowns in that quasi-noble pursuit. I’ve asked a few voracious reader friends to name a book where the American dream is a happy one: most were stuck for an answer. I offered The Talented Mr Ripley, because Tom does get away with Dickie Greenleaf’s money and murder at the end.

The city, of course, has so often been characterised as an infernal, workaday dream destroyer: from poor Lily Bart’s descent on the social ladder to working in a hat shop in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth all the way to the Bret Easton Ellis’s murderous Wall Street yuppie phantasmagoria in American Psycho. (There are exceptions: in the 80s, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney occasionally painted more upbeat travails of urbanity; Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City presented a utopia of unconventionality if only one were willing to move to San Francisco.)

But American writers really let loose with social critique and the collapse of the American dream outside of city borders. Perhaps no American novel explored the cruelty and chaos underneath the received wisdoms of country life better than Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (“That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequence of it”). And then, of course, there’s The Great Gatsby. People often consider Fitzgerald’s novel the ultimate New York City novel, but it isn’t: it’s a Long Island novel, and it’s essential that Jay Gatsby creates his own self-propelling mythic fantasy land outside of the city in “the great wet barnyard of the Long Island Sound”.

Gatsby is something of an east coast Frederic Remington, re-inventing the domesticated edges to his own liking, drawing the embodiment of the American dream that is built on champagne bubbles and moody green lighting. There’s nothing subtle about the symbolism of Gatsby found floating dead in his mansion’s swimming pool – that definitive emblem of transforming raw nature into a luxury item. By the time the wall-to-wall sprawl of suburbia made its claim for middle-class happiness, writers like John Cheever were re-framing such places as soul-deadening zones of over-consumption and work commutes. The rot inside the picture-perfect house became a literary genre all its own: from Don DeLillo’s paranoiac White Noise, to Stephen King’s horror shows in tight-knit, white-picket-fenced communities, all the way to Jonathan Franzen’s The Shining-set-in-suburban-“houses with no mortgage” The Corrections. (Come to think of it: is the slaying of the American dream a white, straight, male American writer’s obsession? Women, minority, and gay writers, excluded from the fantasy from the start, have tended to write outside this bubble).

The question is, has the American dream run out of road? Perhaps an exhaustion with national myths explains the recent advent of post-apocalyptic literature: from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. When the dream has been blown to bits for more than a century, all that’s left is to tell bleak stories of human survival set in the wreckage of a junkyard. But I believe there are still some bits of the dream left to explore in the country’s literature. Because people still come to America hoping for more – and writers are there on the Ellis Island of the last brick-and-mortar bookstores to break the bad news in clever and incendiary ways.

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