What is your favourite American novel, and why do you think it is special?
My favourite is Little Women - Louisa May Alcott.
I love the structure. The brilliant way that Alcott blends many characters into the lives of Amy, Beth, Meg and Jo the protagonist.
@ Robin: You can have it both ways:
'Franny and Zooey' is not really a novel. It's a book composed of 2 novellas: 'Franny' and 'Zooey'.
So you can claim Catch-22 as your favorite novel.
I highly recommend all 4 books mentioned so far.
I'll add John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to the shortlist.
But I think that I'm going to go with the Piercy.
You've started something here with your question Adrian.
My favourite American novel is Salinger's 'Franny and Zooey'. A small book but full of exquisite family scenes that remain etched in my memory.
However, last year, after a gap of forty years, I did in fact re-read 'Catch-22' (coming back to it -Lorraine- after reading Heller's 'Good as Gold' for the first time. I found 'Good as Gold' so clever and funny I just had to re-read 'Catch-22).
I remembered 'Catch-22' as a very funny anti-war novel. This time round I realised it's also very much an anti-capitalist satire exemplified by the figure of Milos Minderbender and his war-time business deals (and still very applicable today).
Although 'Franny and Zooey' remains my favourite, Catch-22 is now close behind.
Not only "favourite American novel" but - tied with Carroll's 2 Alice books - favourite novel of any country and all time: Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time.
The BEST sci-fi novel, the BEST Utopian novel, which also allows us a glimpse into a DYSTOPIA which might all-too-possibly come into being unless we are active in preventing it, WOTEOT offers a blueprint for a just, egalitarian, caring society. And uncovers the inhumane practices that went on in mental institutions of the 70s. I doubt that things have fundamentally improved.
Having read each book once, I used to say that, as a BOOK, I preferred WOTEOT to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but that the latter was better at disclosing the horrors that psychiatric patients can be subjected to. After my 2nd reading, it was no contest: WOTEOT beats the other on ALL counts. NO question.
Honourable mention - as "favourite AMERICAN novel" to To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.