American holiday literature

So we just went on a 2 week holiday to Italy, and during this holiday, I read 3 American novels. I won't call them 'the great American novel', because none of them were, but it had been an long time since I'd read so much American literature in one go.
First I had to finish The Luminaries, which is such a wonderful book that it deserves its own blog post. Also, it's written by a New Zealander (New Zealandess?).
After finishing The Luminaries and knitting my head together again as it was blown to pieces on the sheer brilliance of the novel, I started with Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Which is different, veeeery different. Also, I'm not sure if it really constitutes as 'literature', but that's just technicalities. It reminded me a lot of We Need to Talk about Kevin, which I was forced to read for a class and still have slight nightmarish thoughts about every once in a while; sad, deflated, somewhat depressed woman describing events to the reader (in the case of Kevin in letters, in the case of Big Brother it never really becomes clear how she is conveying her message to us). The book is about a woman whose brother comes to live with her for a while, and it turns out he's become incredibly fat. Which disrupts her whole life, and her family's life. But really it's about expectations in life, about becoming 'someone', and the American Dream falling apart. The sad thing is that this message is repeated time and again, by the main character, her husband, and everyone else, so that you get incredibly sick of it. The ending was also really really horrible, one of the worst deus ex machinas I've read in a long time, which made me so disappointed with the whole thing that I quickly went on to the next.
Which was The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates. Which definitely is literature. I loved Revolutionary Road, so I bought The Easter Parade on a whim, and also took it with me on a whim. I knew nothing about this novel before I started reading, but it turned out to be pretty close to Big Brother, in that it's also about siblings, and it's also about life not turning out the way you planned, and about the American Dream falling apart. Only it was written 50 years earlier, before people got properly obese, so there's none of that. Otherwise, it's great. Typical Yates, with his descriptions of people and atmospheres and feelings. It's hard to describe, I think everyone should just read Revolutionary Road (it has better character development) and experience it for themselves.
Finally, I read Rabbit, Run, which is the first of John Updike's brilliant Rabbit-series. It describes life in the fifties for the average American guy, which is to say; another American Dream bursting asunder. Harry (Rabbit) leaves his pregnant wife to go on the great American road trip, which reads like the start of a great young-guy adventure story, but as Updike says himself in the afterword 'things fall apart when a young man leaves his young family behind', which is exactly what happens in the novel. And the main character is just so self-absorbed, so stupid (at first you believe what he says and you also think his wife is a dull witted bore, but you quickly find out that he's a narrator you shouldn't be trusting) that you have to love reading about him. And about America in the fifties, with it's nice little details (his mother refuses to buy a washing machine because washing by hand does the job just as well). It was written in 1959, just like all the following Rabbit novels were also written in the last year of the decade the represent, which makes it a probably pretty accurate account of the times.
Now apart from the American Dream falling apart, which seems to be a theme in many American novels, there is one other connecting element to these novels: New Holland. The narrator of Big Brother lives there, Emily Grimes stays there for a year with one of her lovers, and Rabbit drives through it on his great American road trip. Most readers probably wouldn't have noticed, but as someone from the 'actual' Holland, these things tend to stick (I realise that there must be thousands of 'New Hollands' in the US, and I can only be sure of the first one, which is properly set in Ohio, but still, it's a nice detail). Apart from the first novel, which was good in writing and characters but bad in plot, it was a nice trio of American literature. I've ordered the rest of the Rabbit novels, so I'm sure to get back to the US in due time, but for now I'm busy reading the rest of Roald Dahl's short stories, which are a whole different thing all together. Particularly because there is no American Dream; life has failed for most of his protagonists before it even started.

Revolutionary Road

For the past couple of days, I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I sort of came to it by chance: it was mentioned in the Nick Hornby columns and I was ordering something from Amazon and needed an extra thing to qualify for the free delivery (only starts from 25 pounds to the Netherlands), and then I thought: why not? I'd seen the film, so I already knew the story, and 92 5-star Amazon reviews should be enough, right?
Definitely right. In fact, I've started to slow down on my reading so I will be able to read this novel for longer. The depth of character, the smallness of their world and the experience of reading about their lives and seeing how very wrong they are, how very annoying and stupid and short-sighted, but still bewitching in their own way, is fascinating. Since I've seen the film I know how it's going to end, but still, the plot is not the most important thing in this novel, it's the way things are being said, the way the characters develop. That is of course part of what makes something a classic, but it has been a long long time (probably since reading Saturday*), that I've had this experience in a novel.
Also, I've been spending several minutes before falling asleep at night pondering how on earth this could be someone's debut novel. I mean, if this is the first thing he ever published, then I can't really wrap my mind around what he will have written after that. I must definitely read more by this author.
Also, reading this novel has made me put some of the other things I've read into new perspective. The scenes from The Hours that are set in the fifties somehow make more sense after reading this. Same is true for On the Road. It is so interesting to see the widely divergent ways that the fifties were experienced in the US, and it makes me wonder which (if any) of the novels that are written today will make the 50-year mark, shaping the ideas of future people about the time we're living in now.


* I never do these little asterisk thingies but this time what I'm going to say is so widely different from the rest that I can't really help it: a fellow student of English wrote his MA dissertation on post-9/11 literature, and he included Saturday in the lot. This made me very confused at first, because in my mind, the novel is about almost everything but 9/11. But then I talked about it with him, and he explained some points, and now I feel like there is this whole layer to my favourite novel that I'd never noticed or knew about before, and I will definitely have to re-read Saturday some time really soon, but first I have to come to terms with the fact that there is still more to be found in something I've already read and loved 5 times over. Literature is hard work, sometimes.