SOURCE: “The Case of Raintree County,” in A Question of Quality: Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing, edited by Louis Filler, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, pp. 213-18.

In the following essay, Dessner revisits Raintree County hoping to find the novel worthy of its initial fanfare, but finds instead very little to praise.

Raintree County, a novel of over a thousand pages, was published, with considerable fanfare, some twenty-five years ago. Its author, an obscure young English teacher from Indiana, who had been supporting his wife and their four children on $2,500 a year, had received, six months prior to publication of his first book, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Novel Award and the $125,000 with which MGM asserted their faith in their judgment. The Book-of-the-Month Club had guaranteed another $25,000, and commercial prospects seemed enhanced by early reviews which spoke of “the Great American Novel,” and which referred to the book's possibly...