10 Novels for Dudes Who Dig America

The first book on this list is the easiest to read. Partly because it’s actually a novella, but more so because it’s a gorgeous masterpiece with perfect pitch, flawless prose, and an irresistible setting.

A life told as if remembered in a dream, it’s the story of Robert Grainier, a quiet, sober, but flawed woodsman living in the Idaho panhandle in the early 20th century. He’s one of “the hard people of the northwestern mountains” who settled and tamed the last frontier of the continental US—or tried to. Because Grainier’s tragic experience reminds us that nature can never truly be tamed.

Laboring as a logger and builder of train trestles, he settles into simple happiness with his wife and baby daughter in a cabin amidst vast forest. But a great fire burns through the area while he’s away, vanishing his wife and daughter, and leaving his life in ashes.

Grainier never knew his parents, or where exactly he comes from. And in a sense, his lot is ours: we’re thrown from the Unknown into this mystery called life, experiencing love and pleasure and pain and loss and heartbreak, and then returned to the Unknown again.

Though East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath are two of the greatest American novels, I’m including John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat here instead. First, because it’s hilarious. And unlike the much grander masterpieces, it’s a breeze to read. Set in Monterey, California, after the First World War, it’s less a novel than a series of shenanigans staring the Mexican-Indian-Spanish-Caucasian paisanos of the area, specifically Danny and his friends Pilon, the Pirate, and Big Joe Portagee, who come to live with him after he unexpectedly inherits two shabby houses on a hill above the town.

These drunken jokers are reimagined Arthurian knights of the Round Table, with their own honor code and Danny’s house as an American Camelot. To them, honor means never working an honest job. Honesty is remaining free from the corruptions of capitalism. Success is obtaining a jug of wine—or a woman. Often laughing, sometimes brawling, and always scheming to get a buck, Danny and his friends reveal the mind of man in its simplistic state—one unburdened by career, family, and the clock.

Tortilla Flat a descendent of Don Quixote, and like the Man of La Mancha, its characters will stick in your mind for a long time.

I wasn’t going to include this one, but I must. After all, East of Eden is truly a great American novel, spanning both coasts and covering our country’s most formative period, between the Civil War and the World War I. But it’s more about brotherhood, fatherhood, and friendship.

It begins in rural New England, with wooden-legged vet Cyrus Trask and his two sons, Adam and Charles. After receiving his father’s favor at the expense of his brother’s, Adam goes off with the army. Returning to the Trask farm to receive his inheritance after his father’s death, Adam finds a mysterious woman named Cathy, and whisks her away to central California, to farm in the Salinas Valley.

The West Coast is where people flee to reinvent themselves, then as now. But it doesn’t go so well for Adam, as Cathy turns out to be a sociopathic bitch who shoots and leaves him to raise their twin boys, Aron and Cal. Fortunately, Adam has Lee, the Chinese philosopher-sage-housekeeper, and Samuel Hamilton, the Irish-immigrant-prophet-farmer, to get him back on his feet.

With its philosophical focus on individual choice in a world in which terrible people exist, it’s both biblical, being a retelling of the Cain and Abel story, and quintessentially American.

Speaking of philosophical, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not technically a novel, but actually a treatise of philosophy in the guise of a narrative—it’s what we’d today call autofiction. In any case, it’s a road trip story, with Pirsig’s narrator taking his eleven-year-old son on a motorcycle from Minnesota to California in 1968.

They start out with friends who drive a fancy BMW bike, allowing Pirsig to set up the dualism of Romantic people who enjoy easy experience and Classical people who enjoy fixing things and knowing how things work. Pirsig is the latter, and it got him into trouble.

As he and his son ride across western America, he relates the story of when he was a rhetoric professor in Montana a decade earlier. One day, he asked his students a simple question: What is quality? Their inability to answer was a thread he pulled, eventually unravelling his mind and landing him in an asylum.

As the setting shifts from Great Plains diners to Rocky Mountain towns to West Coast woods, the physical journey fades in importance as the pages give way to narrator’s interior search to remember why he became so obsessed with an idea.

It's a trip.

Charles Johnson is best known for The Middle Passage, but I’m including his more under-the-radar Oxherding Tale, which begins with a joke: a South Carolina plantation owner and his black servant have the alcohol-induced idea to switch marital beds for a night, with the result being the novel’s biracial narrator, Andrew Hawkins.

Andrew never fits in anywhere, and spends the book on a physical and psychological journey for his ever-elusive self—the book’s title and structure are based on the ten Oxherding Pictures of Zen Buddhism, illustrating a seeker’s progress toward enlightenment.

Spending the book’s first half as a black laborer in the pre-Civil War South and the second half passing as white family man in the north, Andrew learns from several gurus along the way: Ezekiel, his tutor who imparts Transcendental philosophy; Flo, a farm owner who schools Andrew in sex; and the Reb, a black coffin maker with the aura of a Hassidic mystic. All the while, he’s pursued by The Soulcatcher, a bounty hunter who spiritually absorbs his victims.

A modern philosophical play on traditional slave narratives, Oxherding Tale is a compendium of wisdom that transcends regions and cultures, and displays Johnson’s impressive erudition and intellect.

Only in America.

Common wisdom says I should include McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, the epic cattle-drive saga that many justifiably claim is the Great American Novel, but instead I’m listing his earlier, slimmer The Last Picture Show. Set in a tiny North Texas town in the 1950s, it’s the story of high school senior Sonny Crawford, his wild best friend Duane, and too-pretty-for-her-own good Jacy. It’s the Texan coming-of-age alternative to The Catcher in the Rye.

Tumbleweeds blowing by dusty poolhalls, weak coffee at all-night cafes, Friday night football, backseat make outs, and oil-rig gigs create the Americana setting. But it’s a dark tale, with violence, alcoholism, and a whole lot of unkosher sex.

For starters, Sonny has an affair with his coach’s forty-year-old wife. And Jacy becomes a little too flirtatious with the local honcho Abilene, getting in over her pretty little head. People are brutal, conniving, and aloof. When only cinema closes, it shows the town in decline.

Capturing a place, time, and mood, The Last Picture Show lays bare the cold loneliness and consequent destructive behavior that plagues many American small towns. But there’s somehow a beauty to it, too. The simple, quiet, stark beauty of the Western plains and its people.

While we’re in Texas, we might as well bring in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The violence in this story makes that in Last Picture Show seem like child’s play. Because a lot has changed in Texas since the 50s.

Now narcos haunt the land, and the novel begins when welder and Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss finds the remnants of a drug-deal gone wrong: a pick-up truck surrounded by dead men, with a load of heroin and over $2 million dollars. Taking it, Moss soon finds himself hunted by one of the most harrowing characters in literature: Anton Chigurh.

A mysterious manifestation of evil, Chigurh murders those in his way using a pressurized bolt gun made to kill cattle. In addition to Chigurh and the cartels, a bounty hunter is also after Moss, and the triangulated chase intensifies suspense like a master detective story.

The book is framed by sections narrated by an old sheriff whose perspective mirrors that of most readers: helpless awe in the face of such ruthless violence. He wonders where America is headed, after our drug demand has created fortunes large enough to buy whole countries, and if the trade’s accompanying violence will swallow our nation as it has others.

Speaking of detective stories, Raymond Chandler is known for his hard-boiled style and his iconic character Phillip Marlowe, the chess-playing private detective. Most think of detective fiction as something less than literary, but when I read a Chandler novel, I’m blown away by the insight and social critique woven into his prose—especially The Long Goodbye.

Set, like all Marlowe stories, in glitzy and corrupt mid-century Los Angeles, The Long Goodbye begins with scar-faced vet Terry Lennox dead-drunk outside a club. Marlowe helps him sober up, and they form a friendship. But soon Terry asks Marlowe to take him to Mexico, as he’s being framed for the brutal murder of his wealthy wife.

The epitome of loyalty and integrity, Marlowe does as his friend asks, and then goes to jail for aiding a fugitive. Released after word comes that Terry committed suicide, Marlowe starts another case to find a missing woman, dwelling among the swimming pools and estates of LA’s fabulously rich.

But nothing is at it seems, and Marlowe uncovers a twisting tale of aliases and unraveling alibis, understanding he’s been played. Ultimately, he has to choose between his competing values: loyalty and integrity.

For Chandler, it’s the moral code that makes a man.

On the Road is the obvious choice for a Kerouac book, as its Beat characters spend the story crisscrossing post-War America, searching for sublime experience in jazz clubs, speeding, and seedy situations. But I’m choosing The Dharma Bums because it takes readers into the sublime of the American outdoors. A work intended to introduce Buddhism to the mainstream, it’s also a celebration of being in nature, with its characters partaking in a bohemian ruck-sack revolution.

It starts when Kerouac’s alter ego Ray Smith hitches a train from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, where he lives in a Berkeley shack with Japhy Ryder, a hip, Japanese-studying, anarcho-Buddhist who schools Ray on the ways of Zen, camping, and simple living.

They climb in the Sierra Nevada, sharing spontaneous haikus along the way. They party with poets in North Beach hangouts, where Tantric orgies make Ray shy. He likes drinking but he’d rather be alone, so he leaves the beatnik scene to become a fire-lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades.

Rather than enlightenment, however, Ray finds boredom, loneliness, and a bit of beatific madness. It’s a reminder that wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us.

Even so, adventure always awaits.

Too obvious? It doesn’t matter: I can’t have a list of American novels and not include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Narrated by humble Midwesterner Nick Carraway, Gatsby is the story of a Dakota farm boy-turned bootlegger who amasses unfathomable wealth in Chicago and New York so he can recapture the happiness he felt during an affair in Kentucky with a Southern Belle named Daisy, before she married old money man Tom Buchanan. How much more American can you get?

Gatsby not only captures Jazz Age America at a time when anything could happen, it hits the literary mother lode because it strikes the nerve of everything America stands for: Anyone can come from anywhere, abroad or from some desolate region within the States, and eventually find themselves living in a mansion on Long Island Sound. Sure, they may have to fictionalize their background along the way, and perhaps do a bit of shady business to come out on top so quickly. But hey, America rewards those who can get away with it.

Yet Fitzgerald’s beautifully tragic tale shows that we can never get away with it. Gatsby obtains everything he wants—only to have it all vanish like a dream upon awakening.