Lewis doesn't have anywhere near the lyricism of TGG.
I know that. I don't think Babbit should be in the running.
But it's still a sucky story. IMHO. I remember being wowed by some short pieces Fitzgerald wrote. I was really not happy by TGG when I got to it.
Good writing only goes so far to cover up characters not worth spending time with (again, IMHO).
I keep thinking: What would I nominate for greatest 20th century American story, and I keep flashing to plays instead of novels. O perversity of memory!
I love Faulkner. I didn't mention him as the writer of the Great American Novel because I think, perhaps, he's too rooted in the experience of the deep South. I have ancestral roots in the same general part of Mississippi he came from, so perhaps he speaks more to my background.
I enjoyed reading the Sound and the Fury. I read it for pleasure and not for a class, and when I realized that the first section is being told by a person with no time sense, and the story was out of sequential order, I thought, Wow...now neat. Then when I got to the next section, I was slightly disapointed.
America is such a big place, still marked by regionalism. For me, probably, the most moving novels by 20th century American authors with stories set in America were by Ayn Rand, Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, Steinbeck, Ernest Gaines, Norman Spinrad, John Irving, Mitchner, Rice, John Crowley.
An eclectic bunch of writers if I ever saw one. A little bias towards the South, I admit.