Most American novels—even canonical literary ones—are built on genre conventions. And it’s interesting to note that many of the twentieth and early twenty-first century’s greatest novels have at their foundation crime tropes shared with the trashiest bus-station paperback (A murder! A kidnapping!). In fact, much of what we read and watch as literary entertainment is preoccupied with the problems of crime and punishment—and not just for their utility as conditions for narrative momentum.
But something else is afoot. If you look at some of your favorite books, you might begin to see a pattern…that maybe there is something wrong, something unjust or broken in our society…and even if you look back at American masterpieces, you’ll see that it’s been that way for a long time.
We sometimes forget or neglect the fact that “Great American Novel” often takes place in worlds outside the American mainstream (and even outside its borders). But we also ignore (at our peril) that the American novel is made of the same stuff as the potboilers, pulp fictions, and the bleeds-it-leads red presses that inspire them. Here are a few that make the most of that inspiration.
Light in August, by William Faulkner
A potboiler about a tortured black man passing for white in Mississippi. He’s a bootlegger and murderer fleeing from the cops. Plus, his name is Joe Christmas—you can’t get much more dime-store bookrack than that. What people forget is that nobody was better than Faulkner at this bait-and-switch: readers think they’re getting melodrama only to discover they are actually reading a modernist masterpiece.
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Still controversial and misread even today, Lolita is an investigation of the monstrous abuses born out of narcissism and selfishness…but it’s also a road novel about a kidnapper on the run. The scandalous subject matter is what drew readers in, but, all these years later, it’s the momentum and artistry that compels us to keep reading. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Humbert Humbert—whose real name we never learn—is above all a self-serving voice driven to defend and explain his crimes, refusing to let us escape his need to control, the book itself a masterful performance of criminal manipulation.
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Sometimes authors (especially those who came to us after the peak of high modernism) can trick us by being upfront with their book’s generic nature. We all know Blood Meridian as the late 20th century’s great postmodern meditation on atavistic violence enacted across a land that God forgot. But if we pull back the dusty curtain on its western form, we can soon see that that Glanton’s gang is an American nightmare assembly of ex-soldiers and killers who perpetuate what the state ultimately wants: the wholesale slaughter of natives by a motorcycle gang on horseback, a militia from hell.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Among many other things, Beloved is a gothic ghost story, a form that has quite a lot of literary provenance, from Shirley Jackson to Henry James, Poe, and Emily Bronte. But like McCarthy, Morrison draws from multiple genres. Her project is to remind us of the human truth that is often mystified by language and habits of thinking. The idea for the novel came to Morrison when she read about Margaret Garner, a woman who killed her own child rather than return her to slavery. At root, Beloved is about a woman haunted by a crime, but the crime is not that of the individual, which is how we are habituated to think about crime. The crime haunting Morrison’s story is the national crime of slavery, endorsed by the US Constitution and carried out over hundreds of years. Morrison uses generic conventions—and how they make us think and what they hide from us—in order to get us to see the undead ghost of slavery still speaking its horrors.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli’s legal fiction of the border, Lost Children Archive, is rich territory for mapping crimes. Human rights violations by federal agencies, human trafficking by coyotes, environmental destruction by the border wall—these things happen every day from Texas to California. The quotidianess obscures the truth, which is why we need literature: to help us see. Luiselli writing about us today, right where we are sitting now, but she connects the crimes of the past (the actual drawing of the border, the expulsion of the Apache from their native lands) to those crimes of today (the separating of parents from children, the refusal to acknowledge refugee status) showing us a criminal past that extends to a criminal present. Focusing on a family traveling from New York to Arizona (a mirror image of the Mexican and Central American Triangle families going from south to north) Luiselli’s book is about the effect this country’s policies have on “legal” American families.
Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
Yuri Herrera’s books (translated by Lisa Dillman) are about crimes and criminals and usually set on the border (though sometimes it’s hard to tell). They’re little Lynchian fever dreams in the literary tradition of Juan Rulfo, one of Mexico’s greatest and strangest writers. The characters have names like The Artist, The Redeemer, and the Jeweler, though there’s also Makina and Chucho, characters who are fleeing and bringing messages and singing and killing and dying. In Signs Preceding the End of the World, a character looks out on the country she’s traveling through and wonders at “the hell that might be festering out there: what grows and what rots when you’re looking the other way.” Reading Herrera, you might want to look the other way, but you’ll not be able to.
Norte, by Edmundo Paz Soldán
If you haven’t read Bolaño’s 2666, well, go read it. Seriously. Right now. After you’re done, check out Norte (translated by Valerie Miles). Paz Soldán’s portrait of a serial killer, Norte is—like 2666—a book constructed from different POVs, but concerned most of all with misogynistic violence birthed in no small part from border territories and the crimes that seep from it and because of it and soak both Mexico and the US in blood. Loosely based on the Railroad Killer, Norte takes us across time and borders and into the minds of victims, killers, artists, and madmen.
These Women, by Ivy Pochoda
These Women is another book about misogynistic violence, this time centered on the strippers and prostitutes of Los Angeles. The genius of Pochoda’s book is how well it does away with the murderer—there is little in the way of a manhunt or clue-finding. Instead, the book draws its power and astonishing narrative momentum by focusing on the lived lives of the women killed, nearly killed, and troublingly proximate to this monster. No less riveting than a traditional serial killer story, what emerges from These Women is a more complex portrait of our relationship to horrific violence.
Marilou Is Everywhere, by Sarah Elaine Smith
In her fantastic debut Marilous Is Everywhere, Smith pulls off a similarly incredible shift: premised on the abduction of a teenage girl, the novel focuses on the way a neighbor girl slowly insinuates herself into the life of the missing girl’s mother. While the book is steeped in the troubles and mores of rural Pennsylvania and rendered in gorgeous prose, what Smith pulls off narratively is just as crucial as the craftwork: as the crime of the missing girl curdles the relations in this troubled community, new, subtler crimes and transgressions occur, as the roles between and within families morph into new silent agreements.
Down the Rabbit Hole, by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Down the Rabbit Hole (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is another amazing debut that like Marilou Is Everywhere privileges the perspective of a younger character to incredible effect. Living in a palace in Mexico with hit men and prostitutes who constitute the retinue of his father’s drug empire, young Totchli wants but one thing: a midget hippo for his pet zoo. But as this short novel unspools, the boy’s inherited entitlement allows him to speak astonishing and troubling truths about the world, ultimately suggesting that life might be the biggest criminal enterprise of them all.
America Was Hard to Find, by Kathleen Alcott
Lastly, America Was Hard to Find is a masterpiece of cultural forensics and downright polemical power that should be required reading in American history classes. Like Edward Abbey’s work, Alcott’s brilliant novel is also a trenchant investigation of the hypocrisy that drove (and drives) so many young people to recoil from the American Dream and go on a warpath of escalating violence. Set against a reimagined space race, you’ll watch Fay Fern in America Was Hard to Find battle so mightily against the lie of American decency that you won’t just sympathize with her acts of criminal protest…you’ll be ashamed that you haven’t pulled some of your own.
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