ABSTRACT
The notion of the Great American Novel died the moment Hollywood was invented and though the idea was briefly resurrected in the mid-20th century, it died again with the birth of rock and roll. Bruce Springsteen has always gone for the grand gesture and his 9/11 album The Rising was an honorable attempt at a kind of novelistic national vision—a high cultural concept translated to a pop medium. Though The Rising was an admirable attempt at art that heals, it amounted (most of all) to another act in Springsteen’s ambitious pop life. Magic perfects the Great American Novel concept into an Album-of-the-Moment urgency.
