The American Dream Today

Introduction

The American dream has always been a significant theme in literature throughout the nation's history, so it is no surprise that writers at the dawn of the twenty-first century are exploring issues and questions associated with our most basic principles as a country. By analyzing the meaning of the phrase "American dream," modern writers help define (or redefine) the promises the United States makes to its citizens. Writers in the new century find themselves in the difficult position of incorporating modern phenomena, such as family, history, faith, industry, and politics, into a new understanding of what, exactly the American dream constitutes today.

Family Life

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) became a bestseller and won the 2001 National Book Award. Franzen tells the story of the dysfunctional Lambert clan and their attempts to "correct" the various problems in their lives. Elderly father Alfred suffers from Parkinson's disease and is succumbing to dementia; his long-suffering wife, Enid, deals with his slow decline while planning a final Christmas gathering with her husband and their three adult children. The three Lambert progeny—Gary, Chip, and Denise—are all undergoing various traumas, including divorce, unemployment, and depression. The result is a funny look at the modern American family, in all its dysfunctional glory.

Much of the praise for The Corrections is due to its reputation as a "Great American Novel." Earlier authors such as Sinclair Lewis and Booth Tarkington crafted sprawling tales of American families working through their conflicts with themselves and their culture; Franzen's story explores similar literary and social terrain. Of particular interest is Franzen's method of commenting on the ways contemporary society has undermined the American dream, replacing traditional values with materialism, technology, and "quick fixes" to various problems, especially emotional issues. As one character notes:

A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of a disease that requires expensive medication. Which the medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental "health" is the ability to participate in the consumer economy.

While the white, Midwestern Lamberts constitute the "traditional" nuclear family of Normal Rockwell's Americana, they do not represent the typical twenty-first-century Americans trying to live their dreams. Suzan-Lori Parks presents a different view with her two-man show Topdog/Underdog, a play for which she won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. The two characters, brothers Lincoln and Booth, are named after the president and his assassin, but the play is much more a study of sibling rivalry than American history. Lincoln was a legendary hustler who has given up three-card monte to portray Abraham Lincoln—and get "assassinated" by patrons every day—in a carnival. Booth is a shoplifter who lacks his brother's cool head or talent with cards, and wishes Lincoln would teach him the art of the hustle. The play depicts their attempts to cope with their difficult upbringing and frustration with each other despite their closeness, all in the context of growing up poor and black in contemporary America. The play's predictably tragic ending stems from societal and family dynamics, as one underdog reaches for higher status in his world.

Echoes of the Past

In Everything is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer exemplifies the highly modern—some would say postmodern—technique of writing a fictional account of actual events involving fictionalized versions of real people. The protagonist, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, journeys to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Holocaust. His guide on the journey is a young man named Alex whose broken English and awareness of America is attributed to his familiarity with American popular culture. The story is told through a combination of letters from Alex and excerpts from the novel Foer (the character) has tried to write about life in his grandfather's community before the Holocaust.

Foer's technique makes for an interesting reading experience, as readers must get used to reading Alex's letters—one starts off "I luxuriated the receipt of your letter"—then switching to the more formal style of the novel-within-a-novel. Yet the story is always intriguing, and the emphasis on making a journey to discover one's roots and to understand the past forges a strong connection to the American literary tradition. Foer's novel, then, symbolizes the journey of Eastern European Jews to America and their dream of finding a hospitable new country while maintaining memories and respect for the "old country"—even when those memories involve painful recollections of Nazi atrocities.

Colson Whitehead's 2001 novel John Henry Days is also concerned with the conflict between the past and the present, albeit from a different perspective. It is the story of J. Sutter, a freelance journalist who describes himself as a "junketeer," a freeloader who travels around the country sponging off the free items available at publicity events or living off his expense account. Writing in second person, Whitehead observes of his protagonist,

Everything on him is free. His black Calvin Klein jeans hard won years prior at a party celebrating the famous designer's spring line…. His T-shirt arrived in the mail one day with an advance copy of Public Enemy's latest release. Mickey Mouse heads festooned his socks, Goofy his boxer shorts. His shoes bounty from a Michael Jordan-Nike charity event, intended for disadvantaged kids but everybody helped themselves so J. figured why not.

When Sutter is assigned to write an article about the "John Henry Days" celebration in West Virginia, Sutter is reintroduced to folk hero John Henry, the legendary "steel drivin' man" who died immediately after winning a drilling contest with a steam drill. In the John Henry legend, Sutter sees a symbol of man's losing battle with mechanization in the Industrial Age; in his rootless modern life, Sutter is fighting a similarly losing battle against the depersonalization of the Digital Age. Like John Henry, Sutter is black; his place within the context of the nation's conflicted racial history and as a professional black man participating in an empty materialist culture is one of the novel's most significant themes.

Tomorrow's Dreamers

Young writers offered unsettling views of young Americans in the early 2000s. Nick McDonell was just seventeen years old when he wrote his debut novel, Twelve (2002). Writing in first person, McDonell chronicles a week in the life of White Mike, a rich kid who does not smoke, drink, or do drugs but does sell drugs to other New York prep schoolers. McDonell includes numerous references to actual companies and products, acknowledging the pervasiveness of modern consumer culture and its impact on young adults. The title refers to a trendy new drug that White Mike sells. At various points hilarious, thoughtful, and violent, the novel captures the frustration and ennui frequently prevalent among American youth, apparent when the wealthy Jessica makes her first drug buy:

She keeps looking around but doesn't notice the two drug dealers until they are almost right on top of her. She is trying to play it cool, but she has never done this before…. Jessica, eager to get away from them now, says good-bye and turns the corner hurrying toward Fifth Avenue. That was easy. I am so cool.

While McDonell's shocking, violent novel is a fictional account of tragic youth, Koren Zailckas's Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005) is the common real-life story of a teenaged binge drinker. "To this day I can't remember when I had my first kiss…. But like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae," Zailckas recalls. This frequently disturbing book not only traces Zailckas's relationship with alcohol, which began at age twelve, but also the surprising extent of underage female drinking in America today. Years of hangovers, blackouts, and drunken, risky behavior followed Zailckas, who ultimately figures out that she does not possess the usual genetic indicators of alcoholism. Ultimately she concludes that it is society's emphasis on alcohol consumption, the expectation that young people drink (and drink a lot), that led to her problem. This is a sobering realization, for the nation as well as the author, for the American dream has always been that our children are healthy and prepared to take their place in society free from the horrors of alcohol abuse.

Questions of Faith

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) is the story of John Ames, an elderly, dying minister in the town of Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. Ames has a much younger wife and six-year-old son; knowing he will not be around when the boy grows up, Ames decides to write for him an account of Ames's life and times. This account spans more than a century, for it covers the conflicts between Ames's father and grandfather, who quarreled over the issue of slavery prior to the Civil War. While Ames is writing, he must also deal with the reappearance of his best friend's son, a troubled fellow named after Ames.

Like other great American novels, Gilead spans a long period of time and represents the long and sometimes troublesome history of the United States. Robinson is concerned with family conflicts, especially the gulf that sometimes emerges between fathers and sons. She is also very interested in the true nature of the Christian faith, as demonstrated by the many theological digressions her dying clergyman protagonist includes in his letter. At one point, he writes,

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?

Questions about religion permeate Pete Hautman's Godless (2004), a National Book Award winner. Hautman's novel concerns Jason Block, an atheist teen who starts his own religion after troubles with a bully. Jason's plan seems light-hearted at first, but as his new faith gains acolytes, including the bully, different interpretations of the "faith" leads to trouble. Godless is a thoughtful investigation of religious thought among young people and suggests the importance of faith—any faith—in a society that claims to be religious but often seems highly secular.

Media and Politics

Chris Bachelder's 2006 novel U.S.! is a thoughtful and often hilarious satire about the ideological struggle between political extremists in the United States. The novel centers on Upton Sinclair, the real-life writer whose novel The Jungle (1906) spurred reform in the American meat-packing industry. Bachelder has the crusading journalist being endlessly killed by Americans who fear his socialist ideas, only to be resurrected by others who want him to bring attention to their causes. Sinclair's liberal idealism becomes a symbol of the failure of liberalism among contemporary Americans, who are too conservative to embrace Sinclair's proposals. The character Sinclair mocks capitalism during a rant:

Everyone can be rich! Everyone can go to Harvard! Everyone can have a corner office! Nobody need be poor or jobless. As if any of this were possible under this system that we are not allowed to speak of!

Sinclair is the archetypal crusading journalist, a type that many Americans feel is lamentably absent from public discourse at the beginning of the new millennium. Comedians have found it just as easy to make fun of the press as the politicians they are supposed to report on. In fact, surveys indicate that Comedy Central's "fake news" program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is actually a leading source of information about politics and current events for many college-age viewers. Stewart and the other Daily Show writers published America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004), a textbook-style satire about American government, which met with immediate critical and popular success.

America (The Book) is filled with satirical observations on American history, culture, and politics. Photographs, maps, and other illustrations are used to poke fun at politicians and celebrities, living and dead alike. Although written in the comparatively simple and straightforward style of a real textbook—complete with key words and concepts in bold-face type for emphasis—Stewart's fake textbook is laced with ironic comments, observations, and puns. Among the outrageous highlights of the book are a section on presidential nicknames (in which Stewart alleges that thirteenth president Millard Fillmore "lived for eighteen years with a pair of magical talking cats, who for reasons known only to them insisted on calling their human master 'Mr. Norris'") and paper dolls representing the nine Supreme Court justices—in the nude.

What America (The Book) suggests about the American dream is that many of our principles have been compromised by corrupt politicians and media moguls and abandoned by apathetic citizens. Chapter 7, "The Media: Democracy's Guardian Angel," begins,

A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery.

It is no wonder that a group of comedians with a "fake news" show that many fans believe is more honest and relevant than the "real news" are bewildered by the culture of media and politics that made them stars. Like earlier satirists, Jon Stewart and his collaborators hope that making fun of society will inspire people to improve it.

Corporate America

Jon Stewart makes serious points with his humor, but another writer, Barbara Ehrenreich, often uses humor to relieve the very grim discoveries she makes about working in this country. Having previously explored how hard it is to make a living on minimum wage in Nickel and Dimed (2001), Ehrenreich investigates the difficulties of landing a professional "white collar" job in her 2005 book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Ehrenreich spent months trying to land a so-called "good job" in a corporate setting; to her shock, she found that even a college degree and professional credentials were not enough to get the kind of career position she once believed was practically the birthright of hardworking, educated Americans. Ehrenreich is never offered the kind of job she expects to find; her only tentative opportunities are in commissioned sales, jobs that are highly stressful, offer no security, and provide no fringe benefits such as health insurance.

Ehrenreich tries everything, from services that promise to help her improve her résumé to image consultants to "career coaches," all people who make their living by helping other people to find jobs. The amount of time and money the author spends experimenting with these individuals, plus the vain efforts she puts into networking, is very disheartening. Ultimately the conclusion that must be drawn from Bait and Switch is that the American dream of secure employment is dying out, and fewer and fewer people will enjoy the security that Americans enjoyed for generations.

On the other side of the coin, while workers like Ehrenreich struggled at the turn of the twenty-first century, those in the country's corner-offices thrived. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind investigated the infamous collapse of Enron in The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. This book explores how the managers of the company lied about the firm's financial stability; eventually Enron declared bankruptcy, the costliest such filing in American business history. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and life savings in the wake of the scandal. Although a nonfiction book, The Smartest Guys in the Room offers an important insight into the nature of contemporary business and the corporate culture that affects all the members of the nation's economy.

Conclusion

There are of course many other works, fiction and otherwise, that are concerned with the American dream. Some works demonstrate that it still exists, although perhaps in new and different forms. Many suggest that the dream is dead, or at least out of reach for most Americans today. That the first few years of the new century produced books that examine the modern dream from all the traditional angles should at least indicate that the dream is as relevant as it has ever been. It evolves as the country and its people evolve, and it shows no signs of losing its power to inspire Americans, writers and dreamers alike.

SOURCES

Bachelder, Chris, U.S.!, Bloomsbury USA, 2006, p. 182.

Foer, Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated, Gardners Books, 2002, p. 100.

Franzen, Jonathan, The Corrections, Picador, 2001, p. 31.

McDonell, Nick, Twelve, Grove/Atlantic, 2003, pp. 64-65.

Robinson, Marilynne, Gilead, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004, p. 124.

Stewart, Jon, and the Writers of The Daily Show, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, Warner Books, 2004, pp. 103, 131.

Whitehead, Colson, John Henry Days, Anchor Books, 2001, p. 28.

Zailckas, Koren, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Viking Adult, 2005, pp. 3-4.