What Is American Fiction, but a Dream within a Dream?

Photo by Terrance Raper on Unsplash

The title of Dave Eggers’s novel pretty much says it: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

American writers have all been caught somewhere in Jay Gatsby’s dream. Once they saw something fine and beautiful that they could pour their imaginations into. But that thing had a history, a context, and a spirit of its own, and when their imaginations displaced the thing…