In the New York Times, writers Jennifer Szalai and Moshin Hamid consider: Where is the Great American Novel written by a woman?

The question seems unnecessarily provocative to begin with (not even the Times is immune from clickbait, I guess), and Hamid, to his credit, calls this out in his response:

What else are those mind-blowing late-20th-century works by such American women as, among others, Kingston and Kingsolver, Morrison and Robinson, L’Engle and Le Guin, if not great novels? And in our own still-young 21st century, much of the most interesting American writing I, at least, happen to read seems to be coming from women, including Jennifer Egan, Julie Otsuka, A. M. Homes and Karen Russell.

That quibble aside—they’re everywhere, duh!—this is an interesting an essential conversation about literary greatness, the elusive soul of America, and how gender discrimination tarnishes the literary establishment’s judgment of these two things. Reading it, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it time to get rid of the Great American Novel?

Szalai points out that the Great American Novel can include or exclude, depending on who’s doing the labeling. She traces one of the earliest uses of the term to John William DeForest, who applied it to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; however, the novel has fallen out of critical favor, and today critics often deride stories of female frustration and discovery while praising similar novels featuring male protagonists. If Szalai’s right—and I think she is—the problem is not the Great American Novel per se, but gender discrimination inherent in our culture’s definitions of literary greatness, which will follow us no matter what label we use.

Hamid, on the other hand, finds something essentially discriminatory about the label itself—and something contrary to the essence of literature. The whole notion of an “American” novel, he says, is too parochial. And great literature is never parochial.

Here’s Hamid again:

Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.

It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves. Otherwise, why imagine at all? So drop the caps. Drop the “the.” Drop the “American.” Unless you think you’re working on the Great American Novel. In which case, if it helps, keep the notion of it alive in your heart, no longer as a target to hit, but as the gravity you must defy to break from orbit and soar into space.

Read the whole thing. It’s beautiful.

I love this argument—and because of it, I think I’m ready to get rid of the notion of Great American novels once and for all. A work of art to capture the essence of a nation remains an appealing notion, but it’s contrary to what great art does. Art—any art—isn’t about enforcing a national identity. Literature thrives in the margins, in the place where the lines between friend and stranger, native and foreigner, self and other merge.