It won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, beating nearly 350 other submissions and earning Christensen the $15,000 top prize.

[1] The story takes place five years after the death, at 78, of celebrated painter Oscar Feldman, the "great man" of the title.

Her brother had always been more famous than Maxine, which was quite ironic: Oscar became well known in the art world for a diptych of two female nudes, Helena and Mercy.

Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, calls The Great Man "mischievous" and found it "a gentler book than The Epicure’s Lament.

"[2] The San Francisco Chronicle, on the other hand, found it "a regular catfight of unlikable characters."