On his radio program on Monday, Michael Savage let it be known that he was not impressed with the supposed “Great American Novels.” He “couldn't get through the first thirty pages” of Moby Dick. Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is “way overrated.” The Great Gatsby was “never one of [his] favorites.” He never read Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! because he “couldn't stand looking at it.” Invisible Man is a “PC book.”

In place of these pretenders, Savage suggested his own list of classics: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer... and his own recently-released debut novel, Abuse of Power.

Savage explained that Abuse of Power is a “Great American Novel” because it “is about the saga of a single man fictionialized, and it tells the story of what's going on in the world today -- what happens when a man stands up and speaks the truth. He gets crushed by the power.”

He scoffed at critics who would suggest “you're supposed to be dignified and sit back and let an English literature professor at perhaps Berkeley or Harvard declare long after you're dead whether or not it was even a piece of literary work.”

Savage apparently didn't think he was writing a trashy supermarket thriller when he penned his book, instead thinking he was following in the tradition of books that “typify America at that time, through the journey, the odyssey of a single man.” (I don't remember Dean and Sal beating terrorists to death while spitting out catchphrases like “enjoy the virgins, asshole” during On the Road, but, to be fair, it's been a while since I've read it.)

And it's true - his character does go on an impressive, terrorist-punching journey. For example, early in the book protagonist Jack Hatfield is reminisces about bedding “a beautiful blue-eyed Czech woman,” while near the end of the book, he is having sex with a Muslim woman on top of a radiator without getting burned, just “like the Indian fakirs who can be on a bed of nails without later showing puncture marks.” This is what we call a character arc.

According to Michael Savage, Michael Savage has quite the impressive catalogue. Last year, while promoting his book Trickle Up Poverty, Savage predicted it could “change the course of human events” like other historic sociopolitical tracts, including Plato's The Republic.