Great American Allusions: On John Pistelli’s Major Arcana

Major Arcana is possibly the greatest title of the twenty-first century, depending on how you pronounce it. Major Ar-kay-nuh with an Arkansas accent won’t do, nor will trying to rhyme it with Arkansas, either. And as for the German My-orr, let us bid it a preventative Auf Weidersehen. The only way to pronounce it is Major Ar-caw-nuh, with its deserved fluidity. The novel, however, is in part a pronoun novel, meaning it deals with one of the least fluid grammatical phenomena of our times, but from a playful omniscience beyond popular morality that may very well retire the gender genre.