I suspect some (by no mean all) of the Great American Novels have merely dated. Moby Dick, The Catcher in the Rye and that one about the man in the boat – by Hemmingway? – never grabbed me, either.
Or maybe they just don’t ‘travel’ well – British psyche different from US psyche? Can we really appreciate The Three Musketeers or Don Quixote in the same way as the French/Spanish? Or do we need a lifetime of that history behind us to really grasp the subtleties of the works?
(I should really have a column in The Guardian . . . )
😉