Keep Passing the Open Windows!

Nancy's post about The Great Gatsby, has got me thinking about American dreams and myths, like that of the Great American Novel, and how much of a book being considered a Great American Novel coincides with being something else: the Right Book at the Right Time. My personal Great American Novel/Right Book at the Right Time is John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. We found each other just when I most needed a friend and I've read it more often than any other book in my life, returning to it every year or so.

Each time it generously offers me all that is inherent in the idea of the American Dream: possibility, survival, freedom, vitality of imagination, even nostalgia, the list goes on… and is encapsulated best by Fitzgerald in Gatsby's green light. I have a long-standing thesis that The Hotel New Hampshire is modeled on The Great Gatsby because of the feeling both leave their readers with, of standing on the edge of our own horizon.

Some of us want to write the next Gatsby or the next Catcher in the Rye or the next Player Piano or Invisible Man or (insert Your Great American Novel or your Right Book at the Right Time here). For my part, I want to write the next The Hotel New Hampshire and hope that even one reader finds in it the same solace, community, joy, freedom, possibility, and dare I say it, forgiveness, that I have found again and again in its pages. Thank you, Mr. Irving, I'm pretty sure this book has saved my life more than once.

How about y'all? What is your Great American Novel? What book has met you right when you needed it most? And what book's legacy would you most like to leave as your own? What's your The Hotel New Hampshire?