Great American Novel

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Episode 42 of the Great American Novel Podcast considers Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel and National Book Critics’ Circle award winner Song of Solomon. Song of Solomon tells of the coming age of Macon “Milkman” Dead between the Second World War and before the passage of the Civil Right Act. Other unique and complex characters such as Pilate, his aunt, Hagar, his lover (and cousin), and Guitar, his friend and nemesis help round out a complicated and intriguing story about how a young man has to learn who he is and where he came from before the can grow into the future.  
 Critics and fans have long debated which is her best novel.  Is it Song of Solomon?  Beloved?  Sula, Jazz?  Your intrepid hosts weigh in on the debate and also discuss the origins of this novel in a folk tale.  They ask whether Morrison was right or wrong in saying she didn’t practice magical realism.  Please join us in this discussion of an incredible and electrifying novel. 
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) has always sparked great debate about whether it is a noble botch or a modernist classic because its non-chronological form, confounding character motivation, and intrusive narrative voice all seem so compellingly imperfect. In 1951 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley even published a "corrected" edition in which he reordered the novel so it unfolded in sequence---to no avail in critical estimantion. In this story of the talented psychologist Dr Dick Diver and his traumatized wife Nicole we find modernism writ large with events that symbolize the dissipation and diminution of talent and "repose," despite the Divers' surface glamour that makes Americans abroad flock to them in fashionable seasons. And can contemporary readers empathize with the fatal flaw of Dick, whose need for female approval leads him to pursue an adulterous flirtation with ingenue actress Rosemary Hoyt? Ultimately, Tender is a book about falling apart and recognizing that the pieces won't go back together again, not even if you're a rich expatriate living on the French Riviera in the mid-1920s.  
Canon Fodder: Kirk recommends Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin.
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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Episode 40 of the Great American Novel Podcasts discusses one of the great American novels of the Twentieth Century, one that is perhaps more significant and relevant now than it has been in quite some time.  In this episode your feckless hosts discuss All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, a country boy turned crusading attorney turned backroom deal-making, power-wielding governor of a southern state during the Depression era, whose integrity is battered by the prevailing winds of need and corruption and ambition. Stark is inspired by and associated with Louisiana Governor and US Senator Huey “Kingfish” Long.  One of the questions asked by your hosts is whether or not readers are better served by casting aside the real life inspiration and focusing instead on the stories of Stark as well as of Jack Burden, the former reporter turned fixer, and his longtime friends Adam and Anne Stanton. Warren is the only writer who has received the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry; he was also a winner of the National Book Award and was a Rhodes Scholar as well as a winner of both the Guggenheim Genius Grant and the MacArthur Fellowship. 
 Mini-clips of trailers from All the King’s Men, 1949, dir. Robert Rossen, and All the King’s Men, 2006, Steven Zallian.  
Canon fodder for this episode Is Inman Majors’ 2009 novel, The Millionaires.  
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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In 1997 Philip Roth entered a brilliant late phrase of a career that no one really saw coming. While certainly one of the greats of later twentieth century American fiction, he was widely seen as spinning variations on his favorite fixations, sex and women (not necessarily in that order). But with American Pastoral he took on history and into the lives of solid citizens a force of violent disorder he called "the berserk." For most of his life Seymour "Swede" Levov seems gifted by God: a handsome, celebrated athlete, a proverbial hero to New Jersey Jewish communities seeking mainstream assimilation. But then one day in 1968 his teenage daughter Merry commits an act of violence reminiscent of those fabled homegrown terrorist bombers the Weathermen, and suddenly the lives of the Swede and his dreamboat wife Dawn are sucked into the maelstrom of the radical 1960s. Widely considered one of Roth's greatest accomplishments---despite some persistent questions about narrative form and the digressive lack of dramatizing---American Pastoral finds Roth poking at that national myth of self-making, the American Dream (a term we hate!), and asking where such a thing as the American idyll truly exists. 
Canon Fodder: Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document .
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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And now for something completely different.  In its 38th episode, the Great American Novel Podcast throws away its foundational genre with no more regard for decorum than cats and dogs shacking up in sheer defiance of the apocalypse. In this episode we instead consider a host of short story collections held to be so coherent, so cohesive, and so excellent that they are often considered as novels. 
 We ponder: are these books novels?  Are they greater than the sum of their parts?  Are they worthy of their places in the canon?
 Your hosts consider and discuss Wineberg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson; In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway; Cane, by Jean Toomer; Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Catherine Anne Porter; Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdich; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. 
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.