People of letters used to aspire to write the Great American Novel. When I left school, no one had done. Perhaps there's been a claim or two since, but time passed into the era of hyperbole and blurb, so there were a lot of Great American Novels proclaimed on the dust jackets of the 1980s. Then the world turned another click and the very concept of a single America one could interpret was gone. Class, gender, race, ethnicity, origins, region, education, and tribes not yet de