Tomorrow is July 4th. Every other house in the U.S. is going to be thick with smell of smoking barbecues and the sound of brass bands. People will set off unlicensed fireworks, wave cheap plastic flags, and share coal-seared meals in honor of everything the United States of America is supposed to stand for. Yet the US is at a divisive moment, as if the nationwide Thanksgiving dinner squabble we all had in 2016 never really diffused. Some are feeling disenchanted with blind patriotism, while others are doubling down on it. As for me, I turn to reading good books for understanding.
Literature can serve as a guide in these complicated times. It can be a salve for our wounds and a mirror for our flaws. Kurt Vonnegut puts it beautiful when he says:
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With this in mind, I put together a small book list that reflects American history and culture. These books may not be a remedy for our times, but hopefully they can lend a little more meaning this July 4th.
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
I decided to start this list off with a long poem that captures both the spirit of American Individualism and the essence of America’s stylistic contributions to literature.
Whitman’s most daring literary act is exactly what’s written on the can: he has written a song to himself. Instead of penning a lofty ballad or passionate love poem, Whitman writes indulgently and insightfully of his own mental and emotional state. And yet Whitman is anything but navel-gazing. He catalogues the cultural landscape around him, even connecting himself to others in one of the opening stanzas:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Whitman’s Indivdualism is not a selfish viewpoint, but rather a recognition of the universal qualities in each individual’s experience. I can think of few better reads to understand the underlying character of Americans.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Saunders inherits his sense of grimly sweet humor from American greats like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, and he deftly uses it to spin tales that are as compassionate as they are bitingly funny. In Lincoln in the Bardo he uses this skill to take a strangely humorous perspective on a truly somber moment in American history: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s child William right when the Civil War was tearing the country apart.
The humor comes from the spirits of the bardo, an existence between death and rebirth, who try to coax Willie into moving on while his father spends the night in his tomb. The spirits range from grotesquely hilarious to heart-wrenchingly tragic, and their peculiarities keep the grief of the premise from overpowering the entire novel. Instead of touting one issue or another, Saunders treats every character with humanity and curiosity, and ultimately he creates a portrait of America through a patchwork of personalities.
But it’s the pairing of the public and the personal that I find most interesting in this novel. It’s the story of a man trying to balance his duty to a country he loves with his nearly insurmountable personal strifes. I think there is something to be found in that struggle that can help Americans examine their relationship with their country today.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
While Lincoln in the Bardo spans one night, Their Eyes Were Watching God follows its character Janie across her early adulthood. Hurston’s novel weaves a Whitman-esque celebration of self into a page-turning narrative following a young black woman in the early twentieth century rural U.S. as she perseveres through racism, sexism, and poverty. Janie’s ability to move forward and drive her own fate makes her one of the most iconic American characters in classic literature.
Their Eyes Were Watching God shows the U.S. at its most ruthless and its most inspiring. It never shies away from the complexity of the American experience. As Hurston describes Janie’s plight:
She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.
Here in this book is America, somewhere between heaven and a dung hill.