http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-dream-great-american-novel-lawrence-buell/

"It’s hard to encapsulate a far-reaching, ambitious doorstop like Lawrence Buell’s Dream of the Great American Novel. But there is something akin to John McPhee completing his twenty-year-plus opus on geology, Annals of the Former World,with fact-numbing and surprisingly page-turning precision. Like McPhee, Buell has shaped an almanac for those who are intrigued by the poetry and sublime nature of cataloguing all that has come before.