Who Cares About the Great American Novel?

In this week's Bookends feature in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid both take on the fraught question often posed by feminist readers: Where is the Great American Novel -- by a woman? Both writers do full justice to the question, which is nearly impossible to answer correctly. Reply with a list of great American novels by women, and many merely side-eye the political correctness apparently needed to equate Beloved with Moby Dick. Reply that women don't write books of the necessary scope to capture the full American spirit, and ... well ... you just seem sexist. Reply, as both writers here do, that the quest to crown the Great American Novel is a fool's errand that we should give up, and (correct as you may be) you more or less remove yourself from the debate. Because the quest will continue, with or without you.