Book of the week: A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

(Belknap/Harvard, 1,096 pages, $49.95)

No, this isn’t “a history of American literature.” When the 200-plus essays in this volume were commissioned, say the book’s editors, the collective mission was to trace how the inhabitants of our “made-up” country have spoken to one another about who we are. Contributors were asked not to limit their gaze to the dusty books on their shelves, but to address the “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being.” So Ishmael Reed wrote about Huck Finn, but historian Merritt Roe Smith focused on the Winchester rifle. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne, and rock critic James Miller lionized Chuck Berry. As for the opener, could there be a better subject than the 1507 map on which the word “America” first appeared?

A New Literary History of America is so “richly surprising and consistently enlightening” it should be read as if it were our national bible, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Nearly every essay in this bulky tome is good enough that “you could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading” a new entry, as some people read Scripture. Though the historical tour you’ll get becomes less convincing once the book approaches our own era, the first 1,000 pages are “magnificent.” In young Benjamin Franklin’s satirical letters to his brother’s newspaper or in the “romantic” acting pioneered by John Wilkes Booth’s father, you can see the seeds that produced today’s America, and you can even “glimpse our future.”

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Not every essay works, said Ron Antonucci in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “One of the rare clunkers” is the essay on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, by co-editor and rock critic Greil Marcus. Legitimate gripes can also be registered about the choices of Berry over Elvis Presley, of “Steamboat Willie” over Bugs Bunny, and of the near total exclusion of television, said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. Even so, “there are so many great things here,” written by such lively thinkers as Walter Mosley, Andrei Codrescu, and Mary Gaitskill, that complaints are beside the point. This is a “hugely entertaining” volume. “‘Informative’ is where it starts. ‘Revelatory’ isn’t even where it stops.”