Literar...........

Linda Lovelace and James Fenimore Cooper. Together at last.

Welcome to Harvard’s wacky “New Literary History of America,’’ arriving in bookstores as we speak. “Deep Throat,’’ “Roll Over, Beethoven,’’ the election of Barack Obama - it’s all literature now.

What exactly is this wildly uneven, 1,100-page doorstop retailing for a mere $49.95? It’s certainly not a textbook, not unless you are teaching Andrew Jackson’s bank veto, the story of the Winchester rifle, Hurricane Katrina, and “the startling poetry of Juan Felipe Herrera’’ in the same course. The Harvard University Press calls it a reference work, but Publishers Weekly churlishly noted that “Sylvia Plath barely gets a nod as does James Merrill.’’

“Harvard press conceived this as something that would be bought by libraries,’’ says Greil Marcus of Berkeley, Calif., a journalist and academic who assembled the volume with Harvard professor Werner Sollors. “But I think it’s going to have a much different life. You’ll see all kinds of people reading this, arguing with it, getting angry, and finding satisfaction in the work.’’

Lindsay Waters, the Harvard press honcho who oversaw the book, told me: “It’s an attempt to say something big about America.’’

It’s big all right. Two hundred essays! Hundreds of cool contributors, such as Camille Paglia, Sarah Vowell, Walter Mosley, and Howell Raines. And they’re not scared to tackle the big questions. “Does America even exist?’’ Marcus and Sollors ask in their introductory essay. “Should it?’’

So what’s here? It’s all about counterintuitive pairings: T.S. Eliot and Mickey Mouse; Harry Truman and Vladimir Nabokov; “Henry James finds himself in bed with Edgar Rice Burroughs,’’ Marcus and Sollors promise, to which one can only say: Wow, I’d like to see that.

Some of the matches aren’t made in heaven. Harvard professor Helen Vendler phones in a pedestrian essay on the poet Wallace Stevens. The University of Rochester’s Joan Shelley Rubin boils down a chapter from her 1992 classic “The Making of Middlebrow Culture.’’ Critic Ann Marlowe asserts that “Deep Throat’’ and Linda Lovelace’s memoir “Ordeal’’ “continue to ripple through American culture.’’ Really?

With this many monkeys hammering away at this many typewriters, there is bound to be some good material. Michael Tolkin, author of “The Player,’’ contributes a fabulous essay on Alcoholics Anonymous, hitching the plain language of AA’s Big Book to the social critiques of Thorstein Veblen and the soaring rhetoric of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Barnard prof Monica Miller delivers a fascinating account of African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which she found condescending to black people.

The congenitally-on-the-verge novelist Mary Gaitskill tries to parody Norman Mailer’s bombast, but she does remind us how forgettable and mired in self-parody the bard of Provincetown has become. She calls Mailer’s ravings “artifacts from narcissism’s Golden Age.’’ Did someone mention nice writing? After offering up a shaky analogy between “Moby-Dick’’ and Bob Hope’s comic “Road to Utopia,’’ Marcus says of Herman Melville’s novel: “The book is the sea we swim in.’’

I can see this book selling a few copies, alongside such other successful, unread masterworks as Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon,’’ or Stephen Greenblatt’s “Will in the World.’’ But this feels more like miscellany than history, more like a hand-held YouTube for a cultural studies class than a taut, 96-minute Samuel Fuller film. So instead of saying one big thing about America, it says many small things, which don’t add up.

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