You know what they say: a semiquincentennial happens only once, but great American literature is forever. Whether we can all agree on what makes a novel a great American one is another story (considering we can’t agree on much these days). To me, Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife” fits the description. It’s the fictionalized story of Laura Bush’s life, about a woman married to an entitled, charismatic Republican politician with whom she privately disagrees on certain very public issues. Sittenfeld deftly situates the problems of patriarchy and class politics within an intimate, decades-long love story—and what is more American than that potent mix? Well, my colleagues have some suggestions. Below, New Yorker staffers each chose a Great American Novel.

“Miss Lonelyhearts,” by Nathanael West

America is a nation of believers, and improvement is our creed: that tomorrow’s success will avenge today’s suffering. Nathanael West’s 1933 novella, as short as that other great parable of faith, the Book of Job, is its American inversion. The pseudonymous title character, a depressed, drunken, belligerent twenty-six-year-old advice columnist, has no real hardships of his own and is cursed by doubt. Because he cannot bring himself to lend hope, however false, to his desperate correspondents (all beset by the truly Job-like trials of Depression-era New York—most memorably, a teen-age girl born without a nose), he seeks relief in gin, sex, and an ironic, superficial Christianity. His tormentor is his terribly encouraging editor, Shrike (an “American Satan,” per Harold Bloom), who does nothing more severe than taunt him with cutting, decadent parody. A dagger of a novel, brief and lethal, “Miss Lonelyhearts” is the great American apostasy—West reminds us that life does scant giving, and much taking away.—Nicholas Henriquez, director of editorial infrastructure

“Mating,” by Norman Rush

It seems to me that the Great American Novel must necessarily be one of expatriation. And nothing conveys our national image quite like a white, middle-aged man establishing a utopian matriarchal colony in the penetralia of the Kalahari to prove his academic hypothesis about the affirmative potential of feminist socialist coöperation––a close second might be a woman ambling Christlike for days through the desert to reach said outpost in order to bed the older, married social scientist responsible for its founding. “Mating,” the first novel that Norman Rush published, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1991, begins, Americanly, “In Africa, you want more, I think.” A five-hundred-page ekphrastic soliloquy in the voice of an overeducated former Minnesotan, a comedy of manners, a glossary of neologisms, a referendum on anthropology and a great work of it, and an ecstatic love story, Rush’s lush matrix of contradictions, like our own feckless, obdurate, sometimes beautiful country, ends up exactly where it started.—Holden Seidlitz, fact checker

“The Last Thing He Wanted,” by Joan Didion

The protagonist of Joan Didion’s 1996 novel is a woman named Elena McMahon who leaves her life in L.A. to become a political reporter, and then drops off the campaign trail to visit her father, Dick, who lives alone in Florida. As this arc suggests, Elena is a woman accustomed to slipping off identities and out of attachments, abilities perhaps inherited from her father: Dick is an arms dealer. When Dick falls ill, Elena ends up agreeing to complete a job he started, and that Dick believes (Elena doesn’t) will make him rich. Thus, Elena embarks on a journey that begins with her taking a cargo flight from Fort Lauderdale to Costa Rica. Why she does this—and many acts that follow—is basically unaccountable. Didion’s genius was to show that the mystery of the psyche is integral to the mysteries of politics and history. The clean and handsome stories we have of change, told in retrospect, may have their own truth, but the truth, Didion emphasizes, is that individual decisions—even ones about, say, whether to play a part in a scheme to get weapons to the Contras in 1984—are embedded in tissues of human contingency. History is not so much constructed by Great Men but “made exclusively and at random by people like Dick McMahon.” And the story of a person who becomes entangled with a covert government plot can equally be one of a daughter reckoning with the abandonment that comes for all children lucky enough to outlive their parents.—Victoria Uren, books editor

“Winter in the Blood,” by James Welch

James Welch’s 1974 début novel follows a man, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from a beaten-down reservation in Montana, as he wanders the state’s small towns of Malta and Havre and Harlem, a “servant to a memory of death.” The book was originally a poem about the beauty and scale of Montana’s Great Plains, where Welch grew up, and the sentences fittingly shimmer. At one point, the narrator, embarrassed by his own act of cruelty, gives a sobbing woman all his money and then leaves her alone in a hotel room. “I felt the kind of peace that comes over one when he is alone,” he reflects, “when he no longer cares for warmth, or sunshine, or possessions, or even a woman’s body, so yielding and powerful.” The Pulitzer Prize board withheld the award for fiction the year this novel was published; but if the prize were given, Louise Erdrich writes in the introduction, then “it should have gone to the book you are holding.”—Kyle Edwards, fact checker

“Fun Home,” by Alison Bechdel

It’s technically a graphic memoir, but Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical masterpiece “Fun Home,” from 2006, has been on my mind this summer. Like many great works of American literature, the book is an unflinching portrait of a seemingly happy family held together by hubris and fear of change. A key scene takes place at the 1976 bicentennial in New York. Alison is fifteen, staying with her father and brothers at a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village for the festivities. It’s not her first time in the Village, but it’s the first time she realizes that many of the men she sees there are gay. After the fireworks, her father, who has had affairs with men during and before his marriage, slips out for a drink. Four years later, he’ll be dead in an apparent accident that Alison, by then a junior at Oberlin who has recently come out to her parents, will suspect is a suicide. But that bicentennial weekend stays with her. Later, she writes, she’ll remember it as a glimpse of a different world, an immersion in an unfamiliar element that leaves her open to the possibility of something new.—Namara Smith, books editor

“Barkskins,” by Annie Proulx

Before America was founded, before it was colonized, before there were people, there were trees. “Barkskins,” from 2016, is the ultimate natural-history novel, tracking the ripples of two French immigrants who arrive in the New World in 1693 to fell trees and fend off “sauvages,” to tame the dark forest. As events such as the American Revolution and then the Industrial Revolution play out on the margins, the book follows its protagonists’ progeny for three centuries of timber deals and land grabs until, by 2018, some of those descendants are pursuing ecological restoration. Proulx is unmatched in protracted perspective, the wizened oak of fiction, the mother tree of deep ecology; her prose suggests that the smell of this country is wet-wood smoke and gangrenous flesh, that prior to dominating it the land was irrepressible and, after, irreversibly marred.—Ryan Gellis, copy specialist

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P.S. One more Great American Novel, for good measure: “A Thousand Acres,” by Jane Smiley, is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set on a family farm in Iowa, in the nineteen-seventies.